"skyjake had a suggestion:
I’ve been wondering how inextricably linked Gemtext is to Geminispace. Sure, the protocol can serve any other type of content as well, but does it make sense to serve pages in a format that virtually no client supports?
Really disagree with the idea to put Markdown out there.
It’s even harder to parse and emit correctly than XML."
The Gemini FAQ (gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi) got this to say about Markdown (and I agree with it):
2.9 Why didn’t you just use Markdown instead of defining text/gemini?
The text/gemini markup borrows heavily from Markdown, which might prompt some people to wonder “Why not just use Markdown as the default media type for Gemini? Sure, it’s complicated to implement, but like TLS there are plenty of libraries available in all the major languages”. Reasons not to go down this route include:
- There are actually many subtly different and incompatible variants of Markdown in existence, so unlike TLS all the different libraries are not guaranteed to behave similarly.
- The vast majority of Markdown libraries don’t actually do anything more than convert Markdown to HTML, which for a Gemini client is a needless intermediary format which is heavier than the original!
- Many Markdown variants permit features which were not wanted for Gemini, e.g. inline images.
- A desire to preserve Gopher’s requirement of “one link per line” on the grounds that it encourages extremely clear site designs.
Of course, it is possible to serve Markdown over Gemini. The inclusion of a text/markdown Media type in the response header will allow more advanced clients to support it.
That’s the neat part, it doesn’t have to support it ! Simply serve it if you want to, and clients can do whatever they want with it.
