Re: gracefully degrading markup

nytpu writes:

> On Mastodon Glitch-Soc, markdown is supported in toots so you can get emphasis and bold and all that. But, in official Mastodon will strip out all formatting (HTML tags since that’s what the markdown is rendered to). So when writing, you have to be mindful of what it’ll read like without markup.

This is also the philosophy I had in mind when making 7off. Any time I use emphasis or inline code/monospace, I need to keep in mind that it’s gonna go away on the Gemini side of things, only be visible on the web. The text needs to work without it and it often does lead me to rephrasing things. (I also always re-read my posts on both, after publishing, to check if I messed up with this.)

> But in HTML, I could still provide those inline links just fine (as long as you keep your links subtle instead of BRIGHT BLUE & UNDERLINED).

Same with links. With 7off I get the texts to be inline (On the “day mode” version of the site, I do use bright blue and underlined, or purple for visited ones, classic web style. If it ain’t broke... while on the dark mode version it’s just the underline, they have the same amber color as the rest of the text..) while on Gemini I get that “list of links below the post” style that I’m starting to prefer.

It’s dumb, I know, but I’m finding myself often actually preferring to read it on the Gemini version. It’s... “quieter”. I’m like... “But I made this CSS! Shouldn’t I prefer it?”

I kind of have three eras of posts (as I edit older posts, I bring them up to the newest style). First, I was writing for the web primarily and I was like “ugh this Gemini thing def comes second hand”. Then came the era where I had become completely enamored with Gemini so even the HTML version of the page had those lists of links at the bottom. Then finally I made 7off so now I get inline links on the HTML and the link list at the bottom on gemini. My intent is for both versions to look as if it was written with that version in mind.

> You could then have really important emphasis that could be “ported” to plaintext using slashes or stars, then less important emphasis that would be stripped out, and the same thing with links.

I really don’t like the slashes and stars on here! It’s so weird, I never minded them in email or usenet, even still use them on there sometimes, but they drive me crazy on here! My dislike for them is completely disproportional. I mean, I do think they’re a little bit bad, but I feel that they’re completely awful. Unfair, I know...

> A gemlog post (or general writing) specific semantic markup would be pretty great.

I’ve sometimes thought that the reason why Gemini succeeded where semantic markup didn’t was that... it just had these seven line types. You are writing “semantically”, as in, with the few semantics that there is, whether you want to or not. “This is a header”, “this is prose”, “this is a link”, enjoy your coffee.

People could still mess it up if they really tried, like using headers for emphasis or using ASCII art for headers. But for the most part, the semantic gist is gonna be preserved (again, what litle semantics there is on here) in a way that’s proving to be so great both for actual calm reading and for all the parsing & scraping shenanigans that makes something like gmisub work.

> You could have links that are always kept because they’re integral to the document, and then “see also” links that can be removed if necessary.

In 7off, I don’t have any way to actually mark links as removable (maybe that is a good idea; I’ve thought about it before but never found that I really wanted it since the list at the end is unintrusive enough), but I do have ways to place some links wherever I want to (at the bottom usually), others automatically at the bottom (so they go along with those that I manually placed there) and some that are almost inline; as an example of the latter, see the “nytpu writes” line above the quote on this very page. Just super happy with this setup.

I take the care to do this even in my “gem-only” folder for posts like this that’s not gonna go on the web.

7off, my gem text generator