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

[Michael Lazar]

On Thu, Sep 5, 2019 at 10:53 PM Brian Evans <b__m__e at mailfence.com> wrote:
> Michael writes:
> > In my opinion this
> > needs to be an all-or-nothing decision:
> >
> > 1. Fixed-width text with no special syntax
> > 2. Reflowed text with some simple flavor of markdown for styling
>
> In #1 above is the idea that there would be no wrapping and any
> text that went over the  width limit would be truncated?

Yes, in my experience this is how most gopher clients do it. You can't assume
that somebody's ASCII banner, or markdown table, or whatever custom formatting
they use is going to look correct if it is reflowed or wrapped. So the safest
thing to do is preserve the original line breaks and just display as many
columns as you can fit in your display.

> I can see that being a bad user experience if someone's device
> does not conform easily to the size that is chosen. It is also
> annoying to enforce. A perfectly fine document would not be
> readable because their lines go to 60 instead of 45?

I totally agree with you that it's a bad experience. That is why I support
experimenting with making the "standard" width something like 45 characters,
so that it reasonably fits in most types of displays.

This would only be enforced for documents of type "text/gemini" that are
specifically designed to be consumed over gemini. I'm not proposing that we
dictate how servers or clients handle other types of text documents.

> In #2 is reflowed what we are aiming for or is wrapped what we
> are aiming for? Both terms have been used during the ongoing
> conversation and I have lost track of which one people are
> preferring and how each person defines them.

I thought we were discussing text reflowing, as defined in section 1.3.5.3 of
the gemini speculative spec. Apologies if I missed the mark on this. This thread
has grown so large now that I feel like conversations are starting to go around
in circles.