Escaping in gemtext

[Philip Linde]

On Tue, 10 Nov 2020 17:17:29 +0100
mbays at sdf.org wrote:

> Here's a possible solution to the problem of escapes which I don't think 
> has been mentioned.
> 
> Currently each of the line types is introduced by a 1-3 char prefix with 
> two exceptions: the default text line type, and the preformatted line 
> type. We can deal with the escaping problem by adding prefixes for these 
> too. So there's a sense in which this actually makes gemtext *simpler*, 
> more regular, even as it adds more notation. As a nice side-effect, it 
> also lets one- and two-liner preformatted blocks take less vertical 
> space.

Another side effect is that a change like this would immediately
invalidate nearly every text/gemini document in existence. Only
documents that currently don't use plain text lines or preformatted
blocks would be unaffected. Every client would also be invalidated
insofar that they would display the backslashes verbatim until they
were updated. That is a huge cost for a problem that's so far largely
hypothetical.

This looks to me like a solution waiting for a problem. Unless someone
can demonstrate a real case where the obvious workarounds (e.g.
leading whitespace) didn't suffice I don't think it warrants a change,
certainly not one that's so fundamental.

-- 
Philip
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