Wikipedia mirror over gemini "proxy"

[solderpunk]

On Sat, May 16, 2020 at 02:55:25AM +0430, Ben wrote:
 
> Or maybe Gemini should support in-line links of its own? It's already got
> some markdown elements in other aspects of page formatting.

I'm really not keen on adding in-line links.  It would significantly
increase the effort involved in parsing text/gemini documents - instead
of peeking at the first 3 characters of a line and then being able to
handle it, every line has to be split up into words and each word tested
individually.

Yes, there are e.g. Markdown libraries out there which will do this, but
they're only usable if we adopt Markdown wholesale, which brings in a
whole load of other problems.  Not to mention that almost none of those
libraries do anything other than convert to HTML, etc.).

The current text/gemini definition was very carefully and painstakingly
arrived at after a lot of discussion.  I'm not saying it's perfect, but
I think any future changes to it will be very minor, and something like
a switch to in-line links is pretty well off-the-table at this point.

I acknowledge that when you are used to being able to link in-line, not
being able to feels weird and different and like you are forced into
clunky ways of formatting your text.  But the one-line-per-link format
has real advantages, aside from extreme simplicity of parsing of
presentation.  It makes links extremely easy to find, and it encourages
neat, well-organised layout where links are put into related lists.  It
works very well in particular for "landing pages" - text/gemini as a
whole does, actually - the combination of headers, subheaders and
sub-subheaders via #, ## and ###, with one-line-per-link, strongly
encourages you to structure your site neatly and to layout the entire
structure on the front page so that navigation is an absolute breeze.
Chalk and cheese, when compared to modern websites.

For content it doesn't always work as well, but before deciding that it
just cannot work I propose we make a concerted effort to develop new
writing habits/conventions which work with it as well as possible.

Cheers,
Solderpunk