HTML as an escape hatch

[Philip Linde]

On Thu, 10 Sep 2020 23:17:19 -0700
Nathan Galt <mailinglists at ngalt.com> wrote:

> On the other hand, I think there’s a fairly, if not fully, general counterargument to all sorts of additions that we might want to make to the spec:
> 
> “There’s nothing wrong — or even uncool — about making a website with only HTML and, at most, 30 lines of CSS that looks great in Lynx.”
> 
> Thoughts? Counterarguments?

I agree with this notion. text/gemini has a very simple format, still.
I think there are several good reasons for that being the case:

1. It's easy to parse. You can write a parser in an afternoon, and a
   renderer for the terminal or your favorite GUI toolkit that same
   evening
2. It's easy to write pages. You can grasp every nuance of the document
   standard in an hour
3. It's human readable. You can easily read a text/gemini page as plain
   text because the markup is minimal
4. It has enough features to write very basic formatted documents, but
   not enough for the author to impose on the user

Similarly, for HTML, there are good reasons for it being structured as
it is. It supports nested documents that allow for greater control of
formatting, but at the expense of all the reasons I listed for Gemini.

If there is a good middle ground between HTML and Gemini, I'll happily
support that as its own MIME type, but I think the final most important
complexity that text/gemini should address is that it shouldn't be a
"living standard". That has a huge cost to site admins and developers.

-- 
Philip
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