Gemtext Critique

I have not much to critique. And Iʼm sure plenty of people already gave their opinions. But anyway…

Itʼs a nice and simple format. It allows textual content to shine and sanitizes the reading experience in many ways. I love it.

The Technical Side

I just wished that all inline formatting characters would have a mandatory whitespace after them. And no tabs, but only a single space. Easy to understand, easy to parse.

Because right now some GUI clients behave differently from each other, which is probably related to their handling of collapsing vs. non-collapsing whitespace.

Another thing is the missing compression. Gzipping text helps a lot to keep transferred data low. For smaller servers (low-power SBCs or even ESPs) this might be more of a challenge, but face it: the Internet is mobile now and cellular data and/or reach is scarce. And I don’t think that putting gzip in-between sending and receiving is a problem at all.

The Userʼs Side

If the above whitespace rule would be specʼd, it would be possible to have hashtags at the beginning of lines. I have to put a non-essential space in front of a line starting with a hashtag or set the hashtags as per-formatted.

Simplicity-Breaking Wishes

I know it defeats the purpose of the visual simplicity of Gemtext and the parsing of it. But here we go:

I really would have loved inline styles like bold, italics, pre-formatting, and links. But it would be harder/impossible for TUI and CLI clients.

Equally not working for TUI and CLI clients would be a smaller font than normal, for things like footnotes. Otherwise it’s only more margin or extraneous characters as separators.

Anchors equivalent to those in HTML, because linking to a certain place on a page is very helpful.

Ordered lists are not be a bad idea, but might degenerate into listicles, and is hard for TUI and CLI clients.

I occasionally need one additional level of unordered lists.

I know those will never come, because it breaks context-free parsing. I guess my static dream format would be having the expressiveness of GitHub-flavored Markdown.