Markdown and Gemini

[solderpunk]

> Having said the things above, I like markdown. I think it is a good fit for what
> we have been floating around with this project on the whole. I think it has a lot
> of strengths. Given the issues above (coding-effort-wise and philosophy-wise)
> it feels like the only way to make things work is to define a dialect of markdown
> as a standard that is a part of the gemini spec (though it could have its own
> spec as well and just reference that in the gemini spec). 

I am very opposed to including a long, complicated, detailed
specification of any markup language in the Gemini spec.  That won't
happen.  Referencing another spec would be fine, in principle.

But here's a question: what would such a spec look like?  It's occured
to me that I don't think Markdown or any similar language has ever been
specced in any way other than specifying how to translate it to HTML.
Which, as JFM has mentioned, is a whole tech stack we don't want or
need.  How do you write a spec explaining how to render itemised lists
in Markdown into plain text suitable for printing in a terminal?  That's
way fiddlier than speccing how to translate it into HTML and let the
browser worry about wrapping and indenting.  It's not impossible, e.g.
lynx must have some system for doing this.  But it doesn't sound fun to
code, and it sounds even less fun to explain *how* to code.  Nobody
other than us is going to write code implementing it, meaning there
won't be off-the-shelf libraries in any given lanuage to do it.

> If that route were chosen, I think we would need to create parsers that return 
> an AST in a variety of languages and make the libraries available to developers 
> to use in their gemini projects. This would be a pretty big undertaking and I do not
> know that it is exactly in scope. But we do seem to keep coming back to
> markdown as a good option that pretty much everyone likes at least some
> elements of.

I like Markdown as much as anybody but this feels massively out of
scope to me.  We have already defined a way for Gemini to serve Markdown
(just by specifying text/markdown).  It's not our fault if nobody knows
what that means.

-Solderpunk