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

[solderpunk]

> I think this is a valid idea that is worth seriously considering. I actually
> went through the same train of thought about a week ago, but I held back from
> posting because wasn't entirely sure how I felt about it, and I'm
> simultaneously working on a proposal for a simplified markdown dialect for
> gemini [1].

I've also wondered about something along these lines.  It's an
intriguing idea.  Some ill-defined and possibly semi-irrational fear
tickles in the back of my head that it *sounds* like a simple and
harmless thing to allow, but could in practice be opening some can of
ambiguity worms that will come back to bite us.
 
> I have a iPhone 10 XR and use the iOS gopher client by Charles Childers. My
> font size can fit 96 characters wide and 44 characters narrow. I could probably
> read a slightly smaller font, but I have trouble clicking on the links with my
> fat fingers.

Thanks for this data point!  I've gotten a few responses on Mastodon to
my query as to what width various people can read on their phones.
Almost everybody has said they can read 50 characters comfortably in
portrait mode.  One person reported 50 in one client, 46 in another.  It
seems like 45 columns would work for the majority of people.  I'm going
to format the rest of this email wrapped at 45 columns to help us all
get a feel for that size.

> Limiting the width below 70 characters is largely unexplored territory. This is
> the type of constraint that could inspire people to get creative in their page
> design (in a good way). Gemini pages might end up evolving their own distinct
> identity that distinguishes them from other text platforms. It could also open
> the door to experimenting with terminal client UI, for example displaying
> multiple pages side-by-side.

I agree that there's a certain amount of
excitement associated the unexplored
possibilities associated with a new format.
Not only would a convention of wrapping
Gemini content at 45 chars effectively remove
the need to add enough markdup to the spec to
facilitate near reflow, it could, like you
say, give the medium a distinctie look and
feel and encourage interesting new
developments like multi-column layouts.

My biggest concern at this point is that link
labels could easily exceed 45 chars and then
clients need to come up with a nice way to
wrap them...

> Perhaps the largest downside of using a fixed width format is that you lose
> accessibility. People with reduced vision might want/need to use a larger font
> than average. With re-flowed text this is easy because the text will wrap to
> fit their screen. Also, I've heard that screen readers work poorly with hard
> line wraps, although I can't find a citation for that.

This is a bit of a concern.  I noticed that
dgold recently removed all ASCII art from
their phlog for accessibility reasons - see
gopher://ascraeus.org/0/phlog/030.txt.

-Solderpunk