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

[Aaron Janse]

I think we made an oversight: syntax nested within quotes.

For example:

```gemini
> > It looks like things are moving along, I wonder if we forgot anything
> > that would make us need to read more than three chars to specify the
> > line type?
> 
> Here's a site to demo gemini's syntax:
> => gemini://example.com Gemini Syntax Demo
> 
> In the future, we can add the following features:
> * foo
> * bar

Client:
 *doesn't know to make quoted link clickable*
 *doesn't know to fancy-render the quoted list*
```

---

Regardless, here are my thoughts on everything else...

I definitely love:

* The use of asterisks only for unordered lists
* The use of plus signs for ordered lists. I wish markdown had this!
* Repeated list markers (*/+) to indicate depth
* Stateless line-by-line parsing

Changes I think we should make to the spec spec, based on what I've read
here and my own opinion:

* Preformatted text toggle lines only need to *start* with three
  backticks. Specify the significance of text after the backticks.
  
  Some ideas:
    * It's permitted in order to please markdown users. Ignore it
    * Display it to the user (could be position in file, language, etc)
    * Use it for syntax highlighting

* Specify that preformatted code blocks are intended for content such as
  ascii art and code, meaning that it should be easily copy-pasteable
  into a text editor without needed to undergo extra steps to revert it
  from its displayed form to its original form

* Add horizontal rule lines (three+ dashes)

* Specify that ordered lists MUST use plus sign markers

* Specify Tomasino's nested list system

* Explicitly specify markdown syntax that is not allowed. Random idea,
  but maybe we could even advise clients to shame this syntax the same
  way modern web browsers are shaming non-HTTP sites? Regardless, here
  are some things that I think we should explicitly ban in text/gemini: 
  * Ordered lists using letters or numberal markers
  * Indented markdown lists
  * Unordered lists starting with a dash
  * Embedded HTML
  * Markdown images
  * Tables in non-preformatted text blocks
  * Hard-wrapping quotes
  * Hard-wrapping text
  * Horizontal rules with anything other than three+ dashes
  * Expecting anything special when a line ends with whitespace

Are we really limited to a max depth of three? Even if we allow unlimited
depth of headers and lists, clients would only need to read the first two
chars of a line to determine its type (unless we add horizontal rules,
in which case we'd need to read three characters).

> Hmm.  I would want to think a bit before I lay down a hard statement on
> this because I don't want to impose too much of my own ideology on
> Gemini, as it's supposed to be a general-purpose tool....but I am not
> excited by verbatim dragging of mainstream web 2.0 cultural concepts
> like comment threads into Gemini.

Well, worst case scenario, if someone really badly wants comment threads,
maybe they could use nested quote blocks (assuming we figure that out).

Cheers!