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

[solderpunk]

On Sun, Jan 19, 2020 at 08:15:14PM +0100, Brian Evans wrote:

I've been thinking more about lists and, while I understand the concern
about maintaining simplicity, I really do think that:

> I think Tomasino's response to Julien, in plain text, just proved the _lack_ of 
> need for lists.
>  
> Want a list? Write a list.... handled.

is a bit too simplistic.  Tomasino's response consisted entirely of
short list items which didn't require wrapping, and also happened in a
plain text email, which is a hard wrapping environment and so not
comparable to a "long line" text/gemini document.

In Gopherspace, it's very common for people writing lists to format
multi-line list items "nicely", e.g. people write this:

---
* To demonstrate endurance of humans and equipment in spaceflight for
  extended periods, at least eight days required for a Moon landing,
  to a maximum of two weeks
* To effect rendezvous and docking with another vehicle, and to maneuver
  the combined spacecraft using the propulsion system of the target
  vehicle
* To demonstrate Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA), or space-"walks"
  outside the protection of the spacecraft, and to evaluate the
  astronauts' ability to perform tasks there
* To perfect techniques of atmospheric reentry and touchdown at a
  pre-selected location on land
---

In preference to this:

---
* To demonstrate endurance of humans and equipment in spaceflight for
extended periods, at least eight days required for a Moon landing,
to a maximum of two weeks
* To effect rendezvous and docking with another vehicle, and to
maneuver the combined spacecraft using the propulsion system of
the target vehicle
* To demonstrate Extra-Vehicular Activity (EVA), or
space-"walks" outside the protection of the spacecraft, and
to evaluate the astronauts' ability to perform tasks there
* To perfect techniques of atmospheric reentry and
touchdown at a pre-selected location on land
---

I had worried, before writing this, that perhaps I was a lone weirdo for
caring about this, but didn't have to search too far to find examples of
others doing it, e.g.
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space:70/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2020-01-16_worldEndingStuff.txt

Now, this nice list formatting is simple and easy in a hard-wrapping
environment with fixed line width.  In a long line environment where
clients wrap the line to the appropriate length, and the appropriate
length is different for everybody, it's impossible for a content
author to ensure readers get the first, nicer style of list
formatting.  As a consequence of client wrapping, we get stuck with the
second.

For lists of short items, there is no difference.

Some might argue that this really doesn't matter and isn't worth adding
complicating features for.  But the fact that people writing for Gopher
take the time to do the nice formatting suggests people actually care
about this.  And I don't think it's purely a matter of vanity and
wanting our content to simply look pretty - if that's what we wanted, we
wouldn't be writing for gopher!  I actually think the nicer list
formatting makes for a genuinely better reading experience.  The list is
much more easily and immediately recognisable as a list and it's much
easier for the eyes to parse out the separate list items.  This really
is a functional thing, I think.  A small one, I grant you, but a real
one.  It would be a shame if Gemini content had to be in some ways
harder to read than Gopher content, and ironic if that happened as a
result of the decision to have clients wrap lines to fit the viewport
neatly in order to ensure a better reading experience for everyone!

After thinking about this I am more convinced than I was yesterday that
having some defined markup for lists is worthwhile.  That said, I'm
becoming rapidly less convinced about *nested* lists, especially
without a limit on the permitted level of nesting.  More on that when I
reply to Michael's recent email, which will probably be much later
today.

Cheers,
Solderpunk