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       Thread[.post]: 30.1
       TACKER:  jquah (J.T. Quah)
       SUBJECT: .. Fixed Line Width
       DATE:    13-Oct-22 06:49:04
       HOST:    sverige
       
       Constant 78-char line width is undoubtedly easier to consume by humans. But 
       didn't gopher somewhat overlap with the niche filled by FTP, in the 
       distribution of scientific datasets? I've seen climate datasets formatted 
       as fixed-width files where the newline character separates one record from 
       the next. Each record has thousands of variables. It wouldn't surprise me 
       if some institution is still using gopher rather than FTP to host a 
       repository of datasets like that. Obviously you wouldn't want the protocol 
       itself to disallow the sharing of such useful types of text files.
       
       Lately the niche occupied by gopher has seen the gemini protocol making 
       inroads. Gemtext endows the newline character with special status, allowing 
       the next line's first character to change the formatting (e.g., from 
       paragraph to blockquote). Since some phloggers will be cross-posting their 
       content on gemini servers, they adopt the convention of variable 
       line width, in order to have their content look good when accessed via the 
       "shiny new protocol".
       
       I once derailed a thread in the GEMINI board with a rant about the 
       brain-dead choice by the authors of the Gemtext spec, not to play nice with 
       existing plain-text conventions like format=flowed (which would have 
       allowed cross-posting to Gemini and Gopherspace with no degradation in UX).
       
       
       
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