HTML as an escape hatch

[Alex // nytpu]

> If there is a good middle ground between HTML and Gemini, I'll happily
> support that as its own MIME type
While I understand the desire to have something novel, there really is
no need to reinvent the wheel here. The whole point of having mimetypes
in gemini is so you can use whatever format you want to serve content.
If you want basic linking and sections, use gemtext. If you want rich
formatting (emphasis, boldface, etc) use markdown or asciidoc or any of
a million lightweight markup languages. If you want deep control over
the presentation of the document, use html. If you want no formatting at
all, use plaintext.  There's near certainty that there's an existing
format that generally suits your needs unless you're doing something
like math formulae, and even then you could just link to an image or use
a pdf and LaTeX.

The thing is, I think people have a misconstrued idea of what gemtext
is. The long and short of it is that it's a gophermap with headers and
code blocks. Sure, the syntax is different but at the end of the day
that's all it is. If you can't live without stronger control over the
styling and document structure you should just use a subset of html
(There's absolutely nothing wrong with that! You can still browse gemini
without having a gemini capsule yourself). You could even serve your
html over gemini if you so chose, although I'm not sure how well it'd be
supported by clients.

> 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.
I think this should aim to be the highest priority over "making gemtext
better." Obviously there's an exception right now since it's in the
early stages and not finalized yet, but even now there shouldn't be
massive changes made to the spec at all, let alone changes that turn
gemtext into an ad hoc, impossible-to-parse implementation of half of
html.

-- 
Alex // nytpu
alex at nytpu.com
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