Gopher vs. Inline Links ======================= 30 years of writing for the web has gotten me used to being able to include hyperlinks anywhere, and I like cross-referencing stuff I write. I appreciate the hypertext part of HTML and HTTP. Gemini changes things slightly since every link has to stand alone on its own line, so I can't just link to 5 different things inside a paragraph. I've found I prefer interspersing the links between paragraphs rather than dumping them all at the end of the page. It flows better. It also changes my writing style a bit when I'm writing for the web vs. when I'm writing for Gemini. Of course, Gopher doesn't have hyperlinks, inline or otherwise, except on menus. Sure, you can send a Gemtext or HTML file over a Gopher connection, but you can't count on the client software parsing them or handing them off to a program that will. Digging through Gopherspace over the last few days I've found that most people use plain text for their posts. That makes sense! It's low-resource, it's universally parseable, and it's what Gopher was designed for. But it does bring up the question of how to handle references to other pages. gopher://gopher.kvibber.com/0/log/2026-09-rediscovering-gopher.txt Linking in Plain Text --------------------- Over decades of writing plain text in email, newsgroups, Gopher, forums and social media, people have come up with a lot of different conventions. I've seen these so far: 1. Put the URL on a line by itself, maybe with a line break, between paragraphs. This is simple, easy to copy and paste, and maintains the context around the reference. gopher://gopher.kvibber.com/1/gopher/ It requires zero markup, so no one has to remember codes or rearrange text or keep track of numbers, and it's easy for an app to parse, whether for basic linking or generating previews. 2. Put the URL inline, wrapped in angle brackets, after the thing it mentions. Short URLs are OK, but longer ones need to be on their own line anyway. 3. Use plain-text footnote[1] notation, with square-bracketed numbers inline and collect the URLs down at the end of the page. This avoids breaking the flow when reading, and collects all the external references in one place. Unless the client program auto-links URLs[2], it can get frustrating to keep scrolling down to the end of the page and back up, especially in longer documents. Plus if your client *doesn't* auto-link URLs, it's harder to copy the URL. I've also seen gopher pages that were clearly converted automatically with several dozen footnote-style links, which gets really unwieldy. 1. Well, technically it's more like endnotes. 2. gemini://ruario.flounder.online/gemlog/2021-12-14_Linkification_in_gopher_clients.gmi 4. Put the URL on a line by itself, wrapped in angle brackets. I'm not sure I've seen this yet while wandering around gopherspace, but I remember seeing it in the 90s or 2000s, possibly on newsgroups or mailing lists. IIRC some programs would use brackets as cues to either prevent or reassemble line breaks. Of course, on clients that *don't* treat it specially, it also breaks the easy copy-the-whole-line shortcut. I think I'm going to stick with scheme 1, the plain-text URL on a line by itself. And leave out some of the links I'd include in hypertext. If I convert from Gemtext instead of from HTML or Markdown, it'll just be a matter of stripping out the label. Kelson Vibber, 2026-09-14 kelson@pobox.com