Monday, July 20, 2020
Adventures in Atom
I offer up several feeds for my blog, one of the formats being Atom, a much nicer (and better specified) than RSS (which I also offer by the way). There exists an Atom feed aggregator for Gemini. The Atom specification allows zero or more links to a blog entry. I discussed this with the author of CAPCOM (the Atom feed aggregator for Gemini) and it can deal with multiple links. I don't know about any other Atom aggregators out there, but I'm going to find out, because each entry now has three links per entry—one to the web version, one to the Gemini version and one to the gopher version.
I have a feeling this is going to be fun, and by “fun,” I mean “it will probably break things somewhere because who is stupid enough to use more than one link?”
Update a few moments later …
Of course, becuse of the way I translate links for the gopher version, those using gopher won't see the web version of the link. Sigh.
We're a long way from the halcyon days of ASCII-only text
Rendering text, how hard could it be? As it turns out, incredibly hard! To my knowledge, literally no system renders text "perfectly". It's all best-effort, although some efforts are more important than others.
I don't know if I'm glad or sad I didn't read this article before rendering HTML into different formats. On the one hand, it might have completely discouraged me from even starting. On the other hand, I don't use the full span of Unicode characters in my blog posts (which I'm very thankful for, after doing all this work). But on the gripping hand, Lynx was doing a horrible job at formatting HTML into text, and what I have now is much better looking.
So let's see … we now have three hard things in Computer Science:
- cache invalidation;
- naming things;
- text rendering;
- and “off-by-one” errors.
Yup, that seems about right.
