gemini-fmt idea

[jan6 at tilde.ninja]

May 19, 2020 10:07 PM, "✈個展" <jetkoten at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi all,
> 
> I just joined the list but have read some of the recent messages and wondered if having a
> gemini-fmt tool like Go and Rust use to conform a source document to a pre-existing spec might
> solve some of the issues around Gemini documents meeting the spec and around properly configuring
> the meta headers.
> 
> I feel like the people writing servers and clients are doing a huge service to the community, so
> having this gemini-fmt tool would help ease the load on them by ensuring that the Gemini documents
> that get uploaded to servers for public consumption and are then served to clients are more or less
> guaranteed to conform to the spec. This will save the people who write the servers and clients from
> having to spend time handling all kinds of edge cases. I'm including a preliminary outline of what
> I have in mind here below. Comments are welcome.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> J

Sounds cool, as a tool unrelated to the official spec, just as a utility...

Right now, the verification load is put on the servers anyway, but this could also double as an easy way to get started with writing a gemini server, as you can just take the "verify" part, and not need to re-implement all the checks (and since you can cache the files with some simple checksum, it probably wouldn't be too bad performance-wise to run it as an external executable, even)
for being portable and embeddable, C is also a good choice, mostly because practically every platform has a C compiler, and a LOT of languages have some sort of "CFFI" or similar thing, "C Foreign Function Interface", which lets you call C functions from that language, you can use a C library in python through that, for example...
python3 is probably very much OK for practical usage by humans

> - Something like the preformatted tag to indicate a second language within a text already tagged as
> another language

I...don't think this is part of the spec, but I'd LOVE if there was a way to indicate multiple languages in one document... if you write parts in different languages (maybe are writing articles about conlangs, or want to have some quotes from another language, or something), then it would be really useful to allow signifying the change...