Serious writing (in the Latin script) needs italics

[Matthew Ernisse]

On Tue, Nov 10, 2020 at 05:59:29PM +0100, Philip Linde said unto me:
> Does the client itself really need to do this? Allow the configuration
> of MIME type handlers that delegate the task to other applications and
> it's no longer strictly necessary, but would the user experience suffer?

I'd say it's perfectly reasonable to leave the implementation details up
to the client.  I'd be perfectly happy if a terminal client went and supported
mailcap(5) for example.

> Those formats would both be a hard no for me. If the goal of Gemini is
> to be a protocol that makes the implementation of a client and server
> simple, I don't think that recommending the inclusion of full
> typesetting systems is reasonable. A full distribution of LaTeX in
> particular can easily eat hundreds of megabytes, even gigabytes.

The implementation details ultimatly are up to the client author, as I say
above if they want to just shell out to a command that's fine.  The point is
that it seems like the desire to extend text/gemini keeps coming up, so to
avoid continuing to kick the can in a circle an alternate path may be to
provide guidance to client authors so we can also provide guidance to textual
authors that desire/require the extra expression.

--Matt


-- 
Matthew Ernisse
matt at going-flying.com
https://www.going-flying.com/