Syntax highlighting

[Nathan Galt]

> On Sep 19, 2021, at 1:43 AM, raingloom <raingloom@riseup.net> wrote:
> 
> On Sun, 12 Sep 2021 18:14:07 +0000
> mntn@mntn.xyz wrote:
> 
>> The Gemtext spec would seem to have no problem with this, as the
>> first line is considered "alt text" and it is up to the client to
>> determine both what should be done with it and how it should affect
>> the presentation. But I wanted to put this out there to get a broader
>> perspective.
> 
> That's not what alt text is. It's for screen readers. A bunch of people
> are way into ASCII art so alt text is needed. They are image
> descriptions.
> 
> I recommend the following instead:
> Just name the language on the line before the <pre> block.
> ie.:
> 
> lua:
> ```
> local function whatever() end
> ```
> 
> This way you aren't making an accessibility feature worse by trying to
> overload it to be some generic metadata container.

Someone floated the idea of using the leading ``` line for alt text and the trailing ``` line for language colorization (or maybe the reverse). It sounded like a good idea to me, but the current maintainer of the Gemini spec (not unreasonably) has a try-it-first-and-report-back attitude to these sorts of things and, as far as I can tell, nobody’s modified a Gemini browser to try this sort of thing out.

I use the leading ``` for both types of preformatted blocks and I’d be happy to change my capsule to use this sort of bifurcated thing, but I wouldn’t know what to try out first. My hunch is that moving the language-colorization text to the final position is the winning play, but that’s the option that goes directly counter to preexisting (Markdown) practice/habit/muscle memory, so it’s liable to be the sort of thing that’s screwed up more often (people typing colorizer hints where alt text should go).