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       Thread[.post]: 35.5
       SUBJECT: .. text/enriched vs. gopher clients?
       DATE:    07-Mar-22 03:17:00
       HOST:    iceland
       
       Well, I'd recently skimmed the spec for gopher+:
       
       gopher://gopher.floodgap.com:70/0/gopher/tech/gopherplus.txt
       
       In section 2.5 it describe a +VIEWS attribute that allows you to
       offer multiple views of a document, text, postscript, etc.  Having
       text + text/enriched could work well. A good mobile client might
       look especially hard for a view it could be at liberty to change
       fill.
       
       For me gopher doesn't have a line wrapping problem for normal
       computers, where 72 character lines, as it's been for decades, is a
       reasonable convention for text. The small screen width on phones
       is what causes the problem. Gemini has a solution which I like
       as a reader of gemini pages.
       
       But gemtext is not a great format for the writer. My initial concern
       that "line oriented" gemtext would have a multitude of codes for use in
       columns 1-3 was unfounded. Most of what I would want to write would
       start with three spaces and be regular text. And the resemblance to
       markdown isn't the handicap I thought it was, since it doesn't have the
       more annoying markdown flaws that you stumble on without noticing when
       writing about programming, like paired underscores being special. But
       
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       But gemtext is not a great format for the writer. My initial concern
       that "line oriented" gemtext would have a multitude of codes for use in
       columns 1-3 was unfounded. Most of what I would want to write would
       start with three spaces and be regular text. And the resemblance to
       markdown isn't the handicap I thought it was, since it doesn't have the
       more annoying markdown flaws that you stumble on without noticing when
       writing about programming, like paired underscores being special. But
       needing to write each paragraph as a long line does strike me as a flaw.
       
       One document I read justified it by saying modern text editors have
       a feature like emacs's visual line mode, i.e. they lie about where
       line breaks are as you edit. Well, there are a number of editors I
       use that lack that feature.  gopher and gemini, by being easy to
       implement, could be protocols friendly to non-mainstream operating
       systems like plan9. Well, how would you get acme to do this one long
       line thing comfortably? All I can think is you separate paragraphs by
       multiple newlines but a single line break is "soft" like in
       text/enriched and have a script that merges those lines. Better if we
       could really use text/enriched, which solved the problem in this more
       sensible way.
       
       The android overbite gopher client lets you pinch the font size.
       That and flipping to landscape lets me read 72 char wide text
       documents comfortably. Another solution would be a button you could
       press to toggle between auto-refill and faithful rendering. When
       you get to a code excerpt you could switch.
       
       
       
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