SPOOFED: Cognitive aspects of navigation in gemini space

[James Tomasino]

On 5/17/20 6:43 PM, jan6 at tilde.ninja wrote:
> nothing is preventing me from making an alt-text saying something like "this | that - a poem", so it wouldn't exactly solve anything, other than making it slightly easier to parse (separating only on first space shouldn't be hard at all anyway)

I'm really leaning toward the simplest of all things, which is no
special "type" at all. Just

```[optional whitespace][optional alt text]

The art type is meaningless once we have an alt, so that's easy to
dismiss. The text type doesn't help tell me if the content should be
spidered or read aloud. Including a language property seems nice, but we
don't have a lang property on the whole document, so it's overkill in
this context.

Really the only thing we're doing is codifying a bunch of extra rules
and enumeration so that we can specify code syntax languages. That leads
to clients being able to mark things up, which is fine and all, but
seems far less important than the plain accessibily goal.

If this becomes cumbersome or fragile (space vs no space breaking
things) then people won't use it. I suggest the simpler approach here
will be better for gemini.

If people want to use the alt text area to indicate code & language,
then that's a pattern we can toss into the best practices doc. If it
gets put into practice, clients can check for it if it matters to them.