Is it too late to consider adding a subset of Markdown to the render spec?

[Ciprian Dorin Craciun]

On Fri, Feb 28, 2020 at 11:44 AM solderpunk <solderpunk at sdf.org> wrote:
> I had actually been planning to make a spec change this weekend, which
> would add to the text/gemini definition the verbatim text block idea
> (since nobody spoke out strongly, or even weakly, in opposition to it
> after my last email on the subject) as well as a *subset* of the
> strictly optional extra features we discussed, including e.g. headings
> beginning with # and non-nested unordered lists with *, both as per
> CommonMark.


If you are adding a good portion of CommonMark to the specification,
then why not make take a sub-set of CommonMark?

For example:
* restrict the usage of nested lists;
* restrict in-line links and say that "all links should follow the
syntax `=> link description`";  (or even better `=>
[description](link)`)
* restrict horizontal breaks to only `---`;
* etc;

Then no-one needs to re-implement yet another markup language, and can
just re-use their favourite CommonMark parser and feed it this
sub-set.

Granted this would open the door for people to just ignore the spec
and use full CommonMark syntax, but then one could implement "linters"
on the server side (or even in the client side) to check that only the
Gemini sub-set syntax is used.




> Further, after making that change I plan to decree "absolutely no spec
> changes for at least six months (or maybe three, let's see how extreme
> I'm feeling on Sunday), unless some kind of horrible serious problem is
> discovered (I can't imagine what that could be)".  I don't even want to
> seriously *discuss* possible spec changes for that long.


Why not add a version like `text/x-gemini-2020-03`?


Moreover section 6 of RFC 2046 (governing the MIME types) states:

    https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2046#section-6

~~~~
A media type value beginning with the characters "X-" is a private
value, to be used by consenting systems by mutual agreement.  Any
format without a rigorous and public definition must be named with an
"X-" prefix, and publicly specified values shall never begin with
"X-".
~~~~

Ciprian.