[spec] comments on the proposed gemini spec revisions

[Alan Bunbury]

On 11/10/2021 13:51, Oliver Simmons wrote:
> Clients can do what the hell they like IMO, as long as things that
> transmit over the net obey the spec.
> So gemtext is pretty unlimited, but making protocol requests is
> strictly limited.
> Something like replacing `---` is entirely a client-side thing and
> affects no one but the reader.

The current spec states:

    Text lines should be presented to the user, after being wrapped to the
    appropriate width for the client's viewport (see below). Text lines
    may be
    presented to the user in a visually pleasing manner for general
    reading, the
    precise meaning of which is at the client's discretion. For example,
    variable width fonts may be used, spacing may be normalised, with spaces
    between sentences being made wider than spacing between words, and other
    such typographical niceties may be applied. Clients may permit users to
    customise the appearance of text lines by altering the font, font
    size, text
    and background colour, etc. Authors should not expect to exercise any
    control over the precise rendering of their text lines, only of
    their actual
    textual content.

This gives clients a broad discretion as to what visual modifications 
they make to text lines by altering font size, colours, spacing, etc. It 
doesn't appear to go as far as permitting clients to amend or replace 
the actual text that appears on a text line, and appears to suggest that 
authors should expect to exercise control over the precise rendering of 
their "actual textual content". (At least, my interpretation of the 
second last sentence is that clients may allow users to customise 
appearance of text lines by altering text colour, not text itself, 
though I appreciate it's slightly ambiguous.)

The problem I have with separators and similar visual niceties is that 
they involve deleting or replacing text that was put there by the 
author. What if an author didn't want to put a separator there, but 
really wanted to put "---"? Unless the spec provides that "---" means a 
separator it is not reasonable to expect authors to know that.

In truth I'm not sure in what circumstances a "---" text line would be 
intended as something other than a separator, but I'm sure other authors 
are more imaginative than I am. To take another example, I have 
regularly encountered situations where a single * in a markdown document 
is incorrectly interpreted as marking the beginning of italicised text, 
so the rest of the document is italicised inappropriately. I'd like for 
that not to become commonplace in Geminispace.

Separately, on the whitespace issue, I do think it would be helpful to 
clarify in the spec whether whitespace is mandatory, particularly for 
headers. For example, should the line "#### Hello" be interpreted as (i) 
a level 3 header whose text is "# Hello", or (ii) a text line whose text 
is "#### Hello"? AFAIK that is ambiguous unless there is a clear stance 
on mandatory whitespace in the spec.
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