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                  Adventures in Formatting II: Gemini Boogaloo
                                        
If you are reading this via Gemini [1], then welcome to my blog! Emboldened
by converting HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to text for gopher [2], I
decided to try my hand at converting HTML to the native Gemini text format
[3] (section 5 of the specification), and I'm less than thrilled with the
results and I don't think given the contraints that I could do a better job
than I have.

The format has similarities to Markdown [4] but simpler, and you can't embed
HTML for when Markdown has no syntax to do what you want. I mean, given that
Gemini supports serving up any type of content, I could have just served up
HTML, but well, I have the webserver for that. And I could have just used the
plain text format I use for gopher, but the Gemini text format does allow for
links, and I like my links (even if external links have a half life of about
a year).

Most of the entries will look okay, it's only the occasional entry with
deeply nested HTML that might look wierd.

And yes, the size of the server bloated quite a bit [5] since I reused the
HTML parser, but it's something I'll just have to live with for now.

[1] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2020/07/04.1
[3] https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html
[4] https://www.markdownguide.org/
[5] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2020/07/04.2

Email Sean Conner at sean@conman.org

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