Re: Simple conversions from HTML to simple markups are disappointing

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From: bunburya <bunburya@tilde.club>

Subject: Re: Simple conversions from HTML to simple markups are disappointing

Date: Sun, 23 Jan 2022 14:03:27 +0000

Message-ID: <ssjn7f$1o0t$1@gioia.aioe.org>

On 23/01/2022 12:25, Luca Saiu wrote:

> I have come to believe that the only really practical solution is

> translating in the opposite direction: starting from a simple and clean

> markup (I would say Gemini) and from that generating other simple

> markups (Gopher) and the legacy system (HTML). This can and should

> handle relative, intra-server links.

I believe this is correct, because the features supported by HTML are a

superset of those supported by gemtext. So going from HTML -> gemtext

almost always results in a loss of some information, which means a

choice must be made as to how to handle the loss of information. I

suspect the optimal solution to the problem will depend heavily on the

context, so it is hard to create a perfect, generalised HTML -> gemtext

converter.

Alternatively, you could consider starting in markdown, which lies

somewhere between gemtext and HTML in terms of features. Markdown ->

HTML is easy and commonly done. In principle, markdown -> gemtext

suffers from the same issues as HTML -> gemtext (loss of information due

to moving to a format with fewer supported features), but much less

information is lost as markdown is much closer to gemtext to begin with.

There are some tools out there already to convert from markdown to

gemtext, such as https://pypi.org/project/md2gemini/

I'm guessing the main thing you are missing in gemtext is inline links.

If you start from markdown, these can be preserved perfectly when

converting to HTML, and handled sensibly when converting to gemtext

(there are a few common ways to do this, such as converting to

footnotes, which the above tool supports).

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