Introduction
After discovering the gemini protocol and its clients on September 6, I started messing around on SDF with three pages on September 12. I also tried to get accounts elsewhere and tilde.pink replied. A problem with SDF is that, for some reason, I can't view images in my pages. It might seem like I shouldn't worry about images since gemini is, after all, a sort of souped-up gopher and I certainly don't want to plaster pointless graphics all over just to try to look snazzy and slow down people's browsing experience by trying to make them click on useless things but I *do* want to be able to post a relevant image or two. I also want to be able to use inline italics when I talk about _Some Cool Book_ rather than using underscores, but we can't have everything. Still, I'm kind of hyped about this gemini thing. The problem with geminispace is that it seems to be largely dead and, when it isn't, to be largely about itself, much like this log entry is, but I intend to put up actual non-technical content (book reviews, etc.) and to do so semi-regularly. I always said that I wanted to write stuff about books for myself to help me remember things better and that, having written it, I might as well post it. Off of wordpress and all its spam and stats pages and what not, that'll likely be the case: just primarily writing it for me and then posting it for the heck of it. I mean, for some reason, my blog never got very many comments at all despite a reasonable amount of traffic so that much won't be practically different but, as I say, this will feel even more isolated, I suspect. Which is good and bad, but I'll focus on the good.
So while I am talking about the protocol in this entry, I will say that I get the line-parsing and I like it but I don't understand why gemtext was designed to be a tiny subset of markdown rather than an even tinier subset of (n|t|g)roff. (Unless there was a worry that roff-based stuff would make it seem even more willfully old-fashioned whereas markdown might make it seem hipper.) While roff has alternate ways of doing things inline, it's basically line-oriented and you could write something like
.PP This is my review of .I Some Cool Book which I think you ought to read.
That would be pretty easy to parse and it would have the line re-flowed inline for display which would also take care of another major annoyance of gemtext which is the idea of writing in really long lines which the client will wrap rather than writing in really short lines and having the client join them and then wrap them. At least for a text-centric vim user, it's a major annoyance, even with a partially reconfigured vim[1]. I mean, I could go fer gopher but I like the idea of gemtext otherwise.
2024-10-04: That's not where the article was supposed to end, but it's where I stopped to do other things with the capsule and never got back to it. Basically, I was probably going to go on some more about getting the resistance to each users' individual "if it had just *one* more thing, it would be perfect" suggestion but, really, if half the FAQ is spent talking about an ideology of comfortable reading, comfortable reading includes not only not being assaulted by invasive trackers and ridiculous scripted pop-ups and whatnot, but also the basic things you see in any book, such as italics. Also, I think it's language/markup 101 to have some form of comments (the basic half of shell comments would work perfectly) which gemtext also lacks. I know you can serve basically anything (small) through the gemini protocol and lagrange even tries to render markdown (apparently, though I didn't think it did at first) but you can't count on that and I don't even really want markdown. Just italics, comments, and short lines.
Anyway, then something else might have occurred to me and I'd have gone on about it for awhile before, like a rock bouncing downhill, I'd have come to rest at some point. But this will have to do.
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Page created: 2024-09-20 Last changed: 2024-10-04