Re: [gopher] Hello Gopher Project

On Tue, Dec 16, 2014 at 8:29 AM, Kevin Veroneau <kevin@veroneau.net> wrote:

Thank for everyone for voicing your feedback on Markdown. The only
reason I thought of using a new item type was that detecting if a
plain-text file is Markdown or not isn't easy... In fact, the only
sure fire way to detect it is either by extension or mime-type. I was
going by the latter using a new Gopher type, although many of you have
voiced against this idea. So, the natural way to do this, would be to
use item type "0", and force a file extension on any documents are that
Markdown-compatible.

I'm not against it per-say, but I agree with some of the comments said so far.

Backwards compatibility et all and the types we have are a bit of a mess, etc :)

As for "flavors", I am personally only aware of one, the flavor of the
"author of Markdown", and I always reference it's website's documentation
located here:
http://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/syntax

This would be the exact syntax any parser I'd support would strictly
follow, none of those other flavors, I never heard of. From my
experience with Markdown, this syntax works on every single parser I
have used. I'd personally prefer it if the author say had an example
Markdown document that can be used to easily compare parsers against
this exact syntax.

You can enable Markdown ".md" file viewing support in Firefox, which is
confirmed to work alongside the awesome OverbiteFF project by
installing this Firefox Add-on:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-us/firefox/addon/markdown-viewer/

Just install the Add-on, and create a "0" item type with the extension
of ".md" on your Gopherhole. If you don't have the Add-on installed,
it will gracefully fallback to plain text and still render "readable".

I will update the Overbite for Android client to mimic the same
behavior, and will no longer depend on the "m" item type for rendering
Markdown text-files.

I this this is a good compromise. It works now and in the future

and doesn't break anything :)

Later this week, I will see about putting together an actual spec sheet
of the Markdown parser, basically, a model Markdown document that can
be used to make sure every supported Markdown element renders across
all supported Gopher browsers that include Markdown support. It will
utilize all the syntax outlined in the documentation link I provided
above.

One of the reasons I also want to support Markdown, is that I am
planning on making SCM gateways for Gopher that anybody can download
and use on their Gopherhole. So, your visitors will be-able to
transparently access your Subversion, Mercurial, and of course Git
repositories right from Gopherspace. I also want to start blogging
more on Gopherspace, but don't like just using plain-text, nor do I
want to ever use HTML on Gopherspace. A good middleground that will
please even the most hardcore Gopher user is to use Markdown. This
way, my visitors aren't forced to load a large HTML document, nor are
my visitors forced to just look at boring plain-text.

Haha I was thinking about doing this last night :)

Let me know if I can help in any way!

cheers

James