Documents with mixed languages

[Wolf]

Hello,

I'm considering implementing a gemini client over the Christmas, so I've
started to read the spec. And I think I've notice a missing thing in
text/gemini format. In particular regarding documents with content
composed from multiple languages. The specification provides this
example:

"text/gemini; lang=en,fr"
  Denotes a text/gemini document written in a mixture of English and
  French

However, that seems to be a document-wide settings. If I wanted a
document to have a mix of Japanese and Chinese, I believe it would be:

"text/gemini; lang=ja,zh"

However, that in itself is not very useful. What I think is missing is
an ability to set language for a specific part of the document itself.
I'm not sure if the spec is permanently frozen or can still be extended,
but I would like to propose adding a language toggle command to
text/gemini.

Not sure about specific syntax, basically anything would work, ideally
something that would be not very disrupting if just render by clients
that do not know about it. So for example:

    Here are some examples in Japanese and Chinese:

    !lang=ja
    こんにちは。

    !lang=zh
    你好。

    !lang=en
    And back to the original language.

This is just proposal, I don't really care if it is a switch (like mine
example) or some kind of block.

Now, why is this necessary. For Japanese and Chinese in particular,
Unicode is simply not enough. Same code point can be rendered very
differently depending on the language. So for proper rendering of the
text, you need to know the language. If the document has just one, there
is currently available way to do so (document language), but for
mixture, it is simply not possible. And I think that is a shame.



Thanks for considering.

W.

PS: I'm not subscribed, so please CC.

-- 
There are only two hard things in Computer Science:
cache invalidation, naming things and off-by-one errors.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20211211/b47cc774/attachment.sig>