HTML as an escape hatch

[meff]

Gary Johnson <lambdatronic at disroot.org> writes:

> 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.

I see this largely as a feature, not a bug. HTML desired to be just
this, the de facto and de jure landing spot on the web. It's now become
a vehicle for everything: for applications hooking into a Document
Object Model to modify state, for semantic markup, and for layout. This
has also largely driven innovation into HTML away from other formats,
because HTML is the format that everyone sees.

> 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.

Lightweight markup formats like Markdown and ReST are readable without
your browser formatting anything. Lightweight clients can get away with
not parsing anything and dumping a set of MIME types directly to the
user (either on-screen, to stdout, or however the browser works). HTML
has high quality parser implementations on various platforms in various
languages. XML also usually has good quality parsers available on most
platforms/languages. HNGopher, a Hacker News Gopher mirror, uses w3m to
render HTML content into plain text. Nothing is stopping Gemini browsers
from shelling out to w3m on platforms that have it available and
rendering content this way.

- meff