Re: Mark It Down

skyjake had a suggestion:

> I’ve been wondering how inextricably linked Gemtext is to Geminispace. Sure, the protocol can serve any other type of content as well, but does it make sense to serve pages in a format that virtually no client supports?

Really disagree with the idea to put Markdown out there.

It’s even harder to parse and emit correctly than XML.

[Insert the standard anti-YAML rant that people have here]

Markdown is really human centric. As an editor tool, basically. I use it and love it, but then carefully choose the settings that make sense for each particular export.

I don’t think a network based on markdown parsing makes sense or is a good idea. We lined-in-the-sanded it with Gemtext which, yes, arbitrary, but it ultimately has to be just that, arbitrary.

Skyjake, this is what people were always afraid of with Lagrange, it becoming some sorta defacto new Netscape. Don’t do this. You’ve managed to keep to displaying gemtext beautifully as opposed to extending gemtext or creating a new spacemark format.

I also really disagree with the ansi font support. Please don’t do this.

And to geriksson, which had a suggestion on header levels:

> simply translate headers > 3 into 3-rd level headers with leading hashes

The risk of having all those kinds of extra syntax out there is that some clients will get tempted to start rendering it and then there we are with an embraced&extended&extinguished format. Asterisks for emphasis same thing, and even image-inlining by default.

And please don’t use hacky unicode fonts.

They don’t work on screenreaders.

Just write text. Period. In Gemini. Any questions? Of course not.