Quick update on link syntax
---------------------------
The most recently proposed syntax, which abandons the | separator and
bracketing []s in favour of a short "magic string" to mark a line as
a link and then just whitespace separation, seems to have been well
received. Even people who are not super enthusiastic about it seem
to like it better than the [|] idea, so it's a step in the right
direction and I think it makes sense to adopt it.
Even if we decide to use that general system, there are details to
sort out.
We need to actually choose a particular magic string. The => option
seems very popular - it reminds dgold of their childhood computing
experiences[1], and sloum has told me he likes it as well. Unlike #!
I don't think it is used for anything else, which reduces the scope
for misunderstanding. I know visiblink requested avoiding the use of
angle brackets in the syntax as they are rarely used and hard-to-find
keys compared to many other things, and I feel bad not honouring that,
but every character is strange and rare to somebody. I'm still happy
to hear alternative magic strings.
Do we allow whitespace as the =>? Do we make whitespace after it
*mandatory*. Either way, does "whitespace" mean strictly spaces or
are tabs allowed too?
When I proposed this option, I put the link at the end, e.g.
=> This is my link gemini://some.host.net/some/path
which is easy to deal with in languages like Python where you can
split strings "from the right" and specify that you only want one
split. Sean has pointed out that, of course, the opposite order:
=> gemini://some.host.net/some/path This is my link
is just as unambiguous and would allow a more standard "left split",
which many more languages have built in or easily avaialble. This
*does* make a client easier to write, which means that all else being
equal we should prefer it. But visiblink also expressed a preference
for name-before-url order, and a little bit of research suggests that
this might be more common than url-before-name order in lightweight
markup languages (e.g. Markdown and rST use it), but there are
exceptions too (MediaWiki and, indeed, gopher!). Do people have
strong preferences on this?
[1]
gopher://ascraeus.org:70/0/phlog/019.txt
