Escaping in gemtext

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Ryan Westlund once stated:
> According to the Gemtext specification, any line that starts with
> "```" is a preformatting toggle. This makes it impossible to have such
> a line as part of a preformatted block. I understand the design goals
> of Gemtext, but I believe the Markdown solution to the same problem
> can be lifted straight into Gemtext relatively easily: allow more than
> 3 backticks to open a preformatted block, and require the same number
> to close it as the number that opened it. This way, any possible text
> can be included in a preformatted block. Thoughts?
> 
> The same issue exists with text lines (it's impossible to display "=>"
> or "#" at the beginning of a line of text), but I'm not concerned
> about that because having to prefix such lines with a space is not a
> big deal for plain text, whereas it is for code.

  I was about to recommend the zero-width space, and I even created a
document for this:

	gemini://gemini.conman.org/test/escape.gemini

but I did notice that when the text is selected, the zero-width space is
also selected (as it should).  I have a second file

	gemini://gemini.conman.org/test/escape2.gemini

that uses " \b" (space, backspace character) which didn't work with
cut-n-paste (at least on Firefox on Mac OS-X) but if I viewed the resulting
file in a terminal and then did a cut-n-paste, the output was as expected.

  So the question is---how often are you going to quote material where a
line starts with ```?  Is it often enough to worry about it?  Or could you
place the example as a plain text file and link to it?

  -spc