Markdown and Gemini

[James Tomasino]

On 8/18/19 5:10 PM, solderpunk wrote:
> Given that, thanks to the inclusion of MIME types in the response
> header, Gemini is already perfectly capable of serving of Markdown, and
> given that Markdown is powerful enough to completely replicate all of
> the semantics currently in the text/gemini spec (i.e. it can link to
> other places via URL with a user-friendly label attached), what do we
> actually stand to gain by speccing text/gemini up as something which is,
> roughly, just Markdown with perhaps a few features removed and its
> native linking syntax replaced by our own line-based => alternative?

I am not much interested in forcing a markup format into Gemini at all.
You have established a line-based hyperlinking that fixes some issues we
faced in gopher. We have security in the protocol itself. As we start
talking about the rendering of text we're getting away from heart
described in the FAQ.

I've been a voice behind the discussion of whether to reflow or not, but
even that I'll admit goes a bit further than necessary. You're right
about the MIME in the response header. Let Gemini stay simple. End the
spec there and let clients decide what to do with the markup, if it's
used at all. In another year the markup of the masses may change. We
don't need to bundle that into Gemini from the beginning.