[progre]

The problem with markdown, as I understand it, is that it's not possible to correctly render without reading the entire document.

I think the gemini format is attempting to make it possible to basically render the document line by line.

[graypegg]

Oh that’s a good point! I guess things like bold markers reaching over multiple lines does complicate parsing somewhat if you had to find the paired delimitators. But considering that Gemtext considers the pre formatted text block that starts and ends with backticks to be a “mode switch” I don’t see why you couldn’t consider spec-ing a sort of state-machine markdown. (Maybe that’s already the current understanding of it!)

If you leave off the ending * then everything till the last line will be bold, for example.

That’s gemtext though. Mandatory TLS on the gem protocol makes most of this moot IMO. It’s 10x harder to view a gemtext document in a gemini browser. What simplicity did we gain with markdown--?

[giantrobot]

If only HTTP could serve text/plain documents. If only!