Gemtext or Markdown
Recently I’ve stumbled upon the Gemini Protocol and Gemtext. I am really interested in its syntax simplicity. In some aspects is like a minimal Markdown, although not fully compatible. The good thing is that it can be learnt in one minute. Also, it has a line oriented philosophy that makes parsing Gemtext very easy. This leads to a very straightforward approach to writing and that is what I like the most.
Quick Gemtext reference
Headings: Only # can be used.
# Heading 1
## Heading 2
### Heading 3
Lists: only flat, no nested lists, only uses *
* item!
* item!
* item!
Links: This one is the really nice but breaks Markdown (and Text is optional)
=> URL Text
Quotes: As expected…Simple and practical
> quote
And that is it. The only major thing is that line breaks and empty lines are respected as opposed to Markdown, and that might be a good thing.
=> Gemtext Spec - oficial
=> Gemtext Spec
The syntax is so simple and so line oriented that a parser is really easy to build. You only have to match the beginning of the first characters and parse them into what ever format you need.
A simple example could be written in bash like this (incomplete, there’s no PRE element yet - coded fences)
gem2html(){
local LINHA="$*"
if [[ "$LINHA" =~ ^"# " ]]; then
printf "<h1>%s</h1>\n" "${LINHA#\#\ }"
elif [[ "$LINHA" =~ ^"## " ]]; then
printf "<h2>%s</h2>\n" "${LINHA#\#\#\ }"
elif [[ "$LINHA" =~ ^"### " ]]; then
printf "<h3>%s</h3>\n" "${LINHA#\#\#\#\ }"
elif [[ "$LINHA" =~ ^"=> " ]]; then
read -r first url texto <<< "$LINHA"
if [[ -z "$url" ]]; then
exit
fi
if [[ -z "$texto" ]]; then
printf "<a href='%s'>%s</a>\n" "$url" "$url"
else
printf "<a href='%s'>%s</a>\n" "$url" "$texto"
fi
elif [[ "$LINHA" =~ ^"* " ]]; then
printf "<li>%s</li>\n" "${LINHA#\*\ }"
elif [[ "$LINHA" =~ ^"> " ]]; then
printf "<blockquote>%s</blockquote>\n" "${LINHA#\>\ }"
else
printf "%s\n" "$LINHA"
fi
}