HTML as an escape hatch

[Gary Johnson]

It's true that the Gemini protocol is able to serve up a variety of file
formats given its explicit requirement of mime-types in response
metadata. I'm also happy with the simple stripped-down nature of the
Gemtext format and am not looking for any major changes to be made to it
at this time.

However, I do want to throw in a counterpoint to recommending people
abandon Gemtext and serve up more Markdown or HTML in Geminispace.

While it is true that they can all be served up by the Gemini protocol,
it is not currently the case that very many Gemini clients can render
anything other than Gemtext. If enough people start to publish in
Markdown and/or HTML, we may soon find our experience of surfing
Geminispace to largely be about downloading Markdown and HTML pages
whenever we click on links and then having to open the local files in
our format-specific renderers of choice. HTML pages also reintroduce the
issue of potentially requiring clients to download any number of
auxiliary pages in order to render them. While we could hope that Gemini
publishers will stick to a minimal subset of HTML (for each user's
varying definition of "minimal"), there is no way to enforce this.

This does not sound like much fun to me, and it would impose a much
higher development cost on each browser developer as they would have to
implement rendering engines for Gemtext, Markdown, HTML, etc. in order
to provide their users with a more seamless browsing experience. Given
uneven distribution of resources to maintain and extend clients, this
could drive us down a path in which a smaller and smaller number of
browsers come to dominate Geminispace as the number of requirements on
what they have to render continues to increase.

In a worst-case scenario, we ultimately end up recreating a post-web
monopoly of Geminispace.

Just my 2c, but I'd like to see more folks encouraging the use of
text/gemini or text/plain in Geminispace rather than punting to more
complex formats except in special cases. If anyone is feeling super
restricted by Gemtext, I'd encourage them to spend some time on
Astrobotany (gemini://astrobotany.mozz.us) for inspiration.

YMMV,
  Gary


Alex // nytpu <alex at nytpu.com> writes:

>> 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.


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