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Alyssa writes:
> There is a subtle point about a Gemini limitation here. Abusing Unicode for stylization became common as a hack to allow bold and italics text on plain text-only social media. We see the same trend of Gemini, which also bars formatting.
ew0k writes:
> The hurdle to get over here is something that we take for granted from the web: that the content author wants power of presentation. You and I, as content authors, should not.
I whole-heartedly agree with these assessments, worth to be read in full.
I would like to add another point.
This is just me and my mind and my cultural background. When I saw the techrights page for the first time I looked at it very briefly and then decided to ignore it.
Why?
Well, for me Fraktur writing is either old books (which isn't the case here) or it is (ab)used to carry some special conotation. Together with the sylable "rights" this immediately tends towards a specific political corner. Whether correctly so or not is not of big importance. The very fact, that the page writers resorted to control the representation of their text, made me move on almost immediately, irritated at least, and alarmed to some extent.
It is not difficult to imagine that the use of special symbols, which are used elsewhere, might carry unexpected information. The author maybe completely unaware. The reader cannot really accept complete unawareness. For completeness, I don't even have to resort to symbols. The very (mis)use of any English word can appear in anything I write, because I'm unaware of the conotations, or unaware of the correct term to use in a given context. I can only hope that the reader attributes such glitches to my ignorance rather than malice. So for now I'll attribute the techrights styling to ignorance.
And a very minor point.
Authors making use of the larger area of unicode may produce unreadable text even for the visually unimpaired. On my system I do not have a lot of fonts installed. I like to keep it small. On my system a noticable fraction of the text I see in gemini space is rendered as a box with a hex number inside. This is another instance of the author trying to influence presentation. The favicons fall into this category as well. I can't see them rendered. And it is my choice to do something about it or not.
Cheers,
~ew
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