Text reflow woes (or: I want bullets back!)y

[solderpunk]

>   Well, Markdown has two RFCs (RFC-7763 and 7764), so one could always use
> that to serve up documents---they allow linking after all.  Then again,
> expect to see requests for changes all the time as people use the
> protocol/text format and bump up against the limitations.  I don't know what
> to tell you here---I'm neutral on this aspect.

I've actually always expected that serving Markdown over Gemini could
become quite popular.  Some people are no doubt going to see Gemini
first and foremost as "the web, stripped down" (as opposed to others who
will see it as "gopher, souped up"), and in that sense Markdown is
perhaps a natural partner since it seems to be the leading contender, in
terms of mindshare, for "HTML, stripped down".  I think if Gemini ever
"gets big" in any meaningful sense (which, to be clear, I don't think
likely), that usage will probably be what drives it.  A nice graphical
client which rendered section headers in heavier fonts and did bold and
italics would offer a very nice experience, IMHO.

This naturally raises the question "why not just spec text/markdown as
the default response type?".  I actually quite like Markdown so the
notion doesn't offend me, but I do think it raises the bar a little too
high for client implementation effort.  Markdown is very common and
there's no shortages of libraries for dealing with it, but the vast
majority of them have the goal of converting it to HTML, which is no
good for us.  Of course one can just dump Markdown to the screen and not
worry about line wrapping or section formatting or anything - Markdown
is *designed* to look nice and readable as is.  But Markdown also allows
links to occur anywhere in the text, and providing a nice textual
interface to that kind of hypertext isn't straightforward.  It can be
done, of course, as things like lynx show.  But handling the
one-link-per-line structure of Gopher or text/gemini is trivial, as so
many Gopher clients show.  With text/gemini, you can, provably, write a
usable Gemini client in < 100 LOC.  With Markdown, I don't think this
would be possible (but anybody feel free to prove me wrong!).  I also
happen to think that the one-link-per-line restriction encourages very
clean and usable designs.

It's possible that in the future Geminispace will be split into two
"camps", a mainstream one using Markdown and graphical clients and the
retrogrouch crowd using text/gemini and terminal clients.  Maybe *that*
is how to solve the problem or reflowing text in text/gemini - we don't,
text/gemini is just plain text and if it really bothers you, well,
that's the proof of which camp you're in, so start writing a client
that renders Markdown!

Really just thinking out loud here...

-Solderpunk