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

[Aaron Janse]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2020, at 12:21 PM, solderpunk wrote:
> On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 12:03:28AM -0500, Michael Lazar wrote:
> > 
> > Not to mention, pages like this [1]
> > display perfectly on my iphone using a
> > gemini-http proxy server. Regardless of
> > whether you choose to adopt the ```
> > mode, you're still going to need to
> > recommend a line length for authors to
> > hard wrap their text/gemini files at.
> > And I suggest that 40 is still worth
> > considering for this.
> 
> Yes, I definitely intend to include a recommendation that text/gemini
> content be hard wrapped

May I ask why?

Hard wrapping causes several issues:

1. If someone is using git, for example, to version control their gemini blog
   source code, they might have to re-wrap entire paragraphs in order to add
   one word to the beginning.

2. Many markdown documents have 500+ column lines (one paragraph per
   newline). If we require that Gemini source code is hard-wrapped, users
   couldn't copy-paste markdown into their gemini blog/site without
   hard-wrapping first.

In fact, I think *discouraging* hard-wrapping might actually make life easier
for client implementers. Hard-wrapping would require clients to un-wrap the
newlines then re-wrap to the desired width. I think that's more complex than:

1. Leaving wrapping up to the output medium (e.g. terminal, web browser).

2. Implementing wrapping within the client source code (which would be done
   anyway if Gemini source code *can be* hard-wrapped)

Oh, well. I'm vocal about this because Gemini looks really exciting to me.
As someone who plans to use it, I simply want it to be what I think is as
easy to use as possible :-)

Cheers!