Mike Kreuzer

I may have call to make an unrelated HTTP site again soon (sigh), so against all my recent inclinations I rejigged Zine to also output a fuller HTML mirror when needed. In the process I migrated my old posts across to Gemtext, so the gang's all here again. Unless you're reading this on the HTTP mirror. If so, you can have a teaser:

A list of titles without links

The translation from HTML to Gemtext was via a quick'n'dirty Ruby script. The only thing I created manually was two tables which I didn't bother to code for as there were only the two. If I still had the original Markdown that would have been easier still, but alas that was taken away by a local hardware failure earlier this year, so from HTML it was. I'm using Github style Markdown in a preformatted block as tables in Gemtext. I rarely use tables — twice in thirteen years — but that works for me. It lacks the heading/row accessibility information of a real table which isn't great, but like I say, there are only the two.

What I do often use though are lists. Lists with links in them especially, & those may become an issue. They look terrible in Gemtext. I suppose the Gemini thing to do would be to have paragraphs followed by links, maybe delineated by a subheading, but that approach takes away the semantic meaning of the thing being a list. An actual list with text & links would be better. There are quite a few scattered through the old posts, & so far I've left them looking terrible. It'd mean a change to Gemtext, so it's likely never going to happen as official Gemtext, but allowing list elements to include everything up to the next list element would probably solve the problem, I think. I don't think it'd require the addition of a div-like container element, but I haven't coded it so I don't really know. Yet.

Two instances at least of Gemtext being less accessible than the equivalent HTML from this one small sample of pretty straightforward text. Something to address if I ever get into the browser business. Lagrange not handling SVG images too...