The subscribable Gemtext format feels more Gemini-like than Atom or RSS, in that it’s yet another standard (insert xkcd standards.png here) that we have to implement to add to the pile of the reckless, infinite scope of clients, servers, and writers to have to comply to. A.k.a. by inventing it they dropped even more homework in our laps to have to implement just to publish. Also it adds a full second to my Jekyll run.
Also the time stamps have coarser granularity so if you post multiple posts in one day they might get out of order. But OK. Anything for a standard.
Yeah… I acquiesced and generated one. gemini://idiomdrottning.org/sub.gmi
Using cut -c-10 I chopped off those unwanted hours. Yes, def feels more Gemini-like. Gemini is, as always, the destroyer of all meta-data. No rel alt links, no Dublin Core for CC-BY-SA, and now not even what time something was published. 90s project Gutenberg logic “In the future, maybe people won’t be able to read formatting so we better strip away all formatting”.
I’m such a grouch and parade rainer of Gemini. It just doesn’t spark joy anymore!
It could’ve felt like “Web done right” which would’ve been awesome. It could’ve felt like “Web, except starting over at square one do not pass GO” which would’ve felt soul-crushingly sisyphean but at least clean-slate-ish. But it’s worse than that. It’s “Web, except we are throwing even more stuff, formats, and specs onto the ever-growing pile, for NIH reasons! Enjoy.”
Monday, nothing. Tuesday, nothing. Wednesday and Thursday nothing. Friday, for a change, a little more nothing. Saturday once more nothing.
RSS, nothing. Atom, nothing. JSON and JSON feed, nothing. Every single RFC a great set of nothing. All our hard work nothing.
And they said one to another, Come, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for mortar. One more cup of coffee for the road. One more cup of coffee before I go to the valley below.
I've not even updated my Gemini page generation to take in to account the spec's expectation of line-wrapping.
I *could* update my Gemini page creation to take that in to account... But my source format is reStructuredText, and the expectation of hard line-feeds is baked in to that format. This also plays well with Gopher and HTML has no problems with it... The only outlier is Gemini.
Inconvenient parts of specs are just too easy to ignore.
@yam655 And yes I absolutely feel your pain. This is what I mean by Gemini feeling like work. Since we are implementing something we already have (text on screen) just so it’ll be slightly more hip?
Hanging indents break with simplistic line wrapping. Even if I'm mostly linking to media or plain-text files, every index page on the site is predicated upon functioning hanging indents.
Maybe the effect would be just as good in Gemini with soft line wrapping?
The bigger problem is that I want to rewrite the software I use to have a JSON-first design. If I'm going for light-weight versatile apps, Gemini doesn't cut it for my needs.
@yam655 How do you currently do these indents in RST?
With reStructuredText, I'm using an unordered list with a paragraph under the list item and indented to belong to that list item.
- something linked
paragraph under it.
- next item with a link
I'm pretty sure I can get the same effect just relying on the left-hand annotations provided by Gemini and Gopher for links and dropping the explicit list item markers. Will people get that it's an implicit list, though? I don't know.
Thank you for explaining, @yam655.
Yeah, that is basically the Gemini model. => is pretty much the equivalent of <li><a>.
@yam655 IOW I think people will clearly get that.
OMG @yam655 please unflow your text! Maybe you can go RST -> pandoc -> markdown -> md@gemini -> gmi? Hopefully pandoc gets a gmi writer down the line.
Yeah, I like having hardwrapped source docs too♥ Easier to edit esp w/ line editors like ed, sed, edbrowse, or ex.