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

[solderpunk]

On Wed, Jan 15, 2020 at 06:41:00PM -0800, Aaron Janse wrote:
 
> I think that one-line-per-paragraph would be much better for mobile phones.
> I personally use a web browser proxy to read gemini pages when on mobile.
> Text wrapped at 80 columns looks horrible. Text wrapped at 40 columns looks
> okay, depending on my font size. But if text was one-line-per-paragraph,
> firefox would wrap it wonderfully with *zero* effort from the proxy author.

I am kind of reluctant to make any Gemini design decisions based on the
assumption of a web browser as the user agent.  I understand that in
these very early days this is by far the quickest and easiest way to get
into Geminispace, and for smartphones it's probably the *only* viable
way.  But I hope that as time moves forward the proxies will become a
niche thing, serving as a "gateway drug" for real clients.  This is
surely a valuable role, but for regular use I think they should be
"considered harmful".  They represent single (or few) points of failure,
they involve trusting the proxy operator not to manipulate content
(Gemini isn't sophisticated enough to permit proper TLS proxying, so the
the web proxy is basically a MITM between client and server), proxy
operators have more opportunities to log and track their users than
individual Gemini servers do, and proxy users need to run vastly more
complex than necessary software (i.e. web browsers, although at least
Gemini proxies should typically be usable with nice alternative browsers
like dillo).

(aside: some of these issues go away with proxies designed to be run
locally by the user - a nice project for anybody itching for one!)

None of this is to say the web proxies or bad and that people shouldn't
run them or use them - I'm very gratefully to the people who have set
them up!  But I don't think of them as "first class" clients, and given
a choice between pushing implementation effort onto native client
authors or onto web proxy authors, I will make life easier for native
client authors every time.

Besides, getting a web proxy to provide beautiful wrapping if a
text/gemini file is hard-wrapped at 40 chars involves nothing more than
wrapping paragraphs in <p> and </p> tags.  That's a significantly easier
task than getting a terminal client to provide beautiful wrapping if a
text/gemini file has lines thousands of characters long, which requires
splitting the line into words, calculating and summing the lengths of
words, etc, etc.  Given the choice between making web proxy authors do
a little bit more work and makig native client authors to a moderate
amount of more work, I'm definitely going to choose the former.

> I can only imagine unlimited-column text catastrophically failing in two
> places:
> 
> 1. A very wide terminal
> 2. A very wide web browser

Neither of which are terribly uncommon, right, with full-screen windows
on desktops or even laptops?  My "daily driver" laptop terminal is 113
chars wide.  Although, even on a terminal < 80 chars wide, I kind of
consider words being split across lines as pretty severe failure.  I
don't want to read that - it's even less pleasant than hard-wrapped 80
char lines on a mobile.

> Thanks, solderpunk, for being a thoughtful BDFL!

I'm glad you think I'm thoughtful!  Sorry if I seem to be dismissing the
"long lines" approach out of hand, I promise you I'm giving it a lot of
thought.  I'm already stressing out that I'm being unduly influenced by
the fact that I use simple / old-fashioned editors and mostly write
stuff that should be hard-wrapped (plain text email, gopher content,
source code).  From my perspective, writing "long line" content is a
less pleasant experience for authors, because my editors don't work that
way out of the box.  But I realise that, actually, for the majority of
people that's far *more* accessible.  Someone using something resembling
Notepad is going to have a miserable time writing content hard-wrapped
at 40 chars, while the "long line" format just happens, probably without
them even realising it.

Then again, making text/gemini easy to write with "normal" editors
arguably isn't worth much if the next step is anyway "now use sftp or a
git push to get your content on the server".  Gemini is never going to
be able to support easy WYSIWIG authoring experiences akin to WordPress,
so perhaps it's pointless to consider the user experience for
non-technical types.

Argh!  Simplicity ain't simple.

Cheers,
Solderpunk