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by graypegg 1121 days ago
Gemtext is weird, it’s hyper-focused on a very specific form of text publishing. It’s not trying to be “old internet” featuring the creative freedom of its users, it’s just text content and that’s it. Not even inline links or images! Which I personally think makes it a bad format for the old-internet mainstay of “website about one specific interest of mine”.

I run a little capsule but I find myself with not much to do because I’m really not interested in writing long blog posts. I made a crappy HN reader over gem, it’s not very usable predictably haha

I still think HTML is the ideal creative-indy-internet format.
1 comments
SoftTalker 1121 days ago
Gemtext seems to be more like wanting to be an online typewriter. Back when typewriters were used to write documents, there was one typeface and font, and no hyperlinks or images. To reference other documents you could use footnotes or a bibliography. Margins and line spacing (except maybe for block-quotes) were fixed. A lot of useful information was communicated in this format, but it does seem a bit too austere today.
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graypegg 1121 days ago
That’s a good analogy, that does seem to be the guiding aesthetic they’re going for.

It’s austere but I can see why people like it if they’re really into writing as this raw “doesn’t need anything else” medium. I like my silly little pictures and syntax highlighted code samples though.

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SoftTalker 1121 days ago
The weird thing is you can write like that in HTML if you want to.

    <html>
      Lots of plain text
    </html>
Will render just fine. I don't think any browsers really even require those opening and closing tags.
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Karellen 1121 days ago
You'll need to do a little bit more if you want paragraphs in your text, because otherwise HTML will just smush them together.
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rhn_mk1 1121 days ago
It will not. You'll lose line breaks.
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SoftTalker 1121 days ago
Yes that's true, I'll amend my comment to say that there's nothing about HTML that prevents you from writing in this austere styling if that's all you want to do. Quickly scanning the gemtext intro, it looks like you have headings (three levels), links (but not inline), lists, blockquotes, and preformatted text. That's it. So with these tags you're there:

  <h1> <h2> <h3>
  <p>
  <ul> and <li>
  <a>
  <blockquote>
  <pre>
Granted gemtext markup is slightly more terse, but it would hardly matter in practice.
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