Comment by rcarmo
4 months ago
I wrote a server for it a while back (am still running it someplace behind a CF tunnel) but I’ve never really found either the community or the protocol were taking off:
https://github.com/rcarmo/aiogemini
A key issue with the ecosystem (not the protocol) as far as I’m concerned is that it would have been stupendously better to settle on Markdown (even a simplified form) for content creation. The rest is OK, I guess, but it’s just a nuisance to maintain “dual format” sites.
(I see a few comments here about the community’s opinions and leanings, but to be honest it’s not any weirder than your average old-timely IRC channel or fringe Mastodon server—-live and let live, read what you want and just skip Antenna listings you don’t like)
Being able to parse gemtext line by line with almost no context is a big win for simplicity - you can't really do that with markdown.
It's not like by line but djot was designed to be parsed easier/more efficiently than markdown while being basically as featureful and ergonomic.
It is possible if you restrict yourself to an subset of markdown. It works pretty well, actually, i have two awk scripts that take in a subset of markdown and generate either HTML or LaTeX.
Sure, that's fair! In any case, I personally prefer the aesthetics and the readability of gemtext to markdown (especially when it comes to links!)
Pure ascii text is also a subset of markdown, so it doesn't really say much that it works for a restricted subset.
Uh, how much simplicity do you really gain? What's an instance of needing to backtrack?
You can have "[click me][1]" at the top and then "[1]: https://example.com" at the bottom. You wouldn't be able to render the link until the whole document was downloaded.