+++ Monday 24 February 2025 +++
Shorter lines in gophermap
==========================
IanJ liked my formatting of the phlog titles in the gophermap and
copied it [1].
After that, he discovered that the length of the lines in it
doen't play nice with the old UMN gopher client.
The RFC [2] mentions the lenght of lines of gophermaps:
3.9 User display strings and server selector strings
User display strings are intended to be displayed on a line on a
typical screen for a user's viewing pleasure. While many screens can
accommodate 80 character lines, some space is needed to display a tag
of some sort to tell the user what sort of item this is. Because of
this, the user display string should be kept under 70 characters in
length. Clients may truncate to a length convenient to them.
Format of phlog titles in the gophermap
---------------------------------------
In my gophermap, the format is:
* title
* whitespace
* date
The date is in the format `YYYY-MM-DD', which is ten chars.
Keeping the gophermap lines below 70 chars
------------------------------------------
To keep the phlog titles in the gophermap below 70 chars,
and keeping some `breathing room' for the date,
the lenght of the title itself must not exceed 70 - 12 = 58 chars.
This way the total length of the line is 69, which is below 70 :)
I had set a line length of 70 chars. Today I made the following changes:
* in the current gophermap, removed one space before the date
so all the lines with titles are 69 chars
* changed the titles that didn't fit anymore
* in my Elisp script, change width of the string in the function that
create gohpermap entries
* change the script that sets the title as level 1 org-mode header,
so it highlights the title if it exceeds 58 chars
I'm not sure if the gophermap is now UMN-gopher-client-proof, but
it complies to paragraph 3.9 of the RFC.
[1]:
gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/Phlog-format.md
[2]:
gopher://i-logout.cz/0/ascii/t/rfc1436.txt
Last edited: $Date: 2025/02/24 13:07:29 $
