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--post-date: 2024-01-01
--tags: tech
--type: blog
<article>
<h1>Choosing to write in HTML</h1>
<p>
I actually write my blog posts (now) in HTML. A while back I wrote about moving to markdown to facilitate my posting. But before then, when I was writing in HTML, I was kinda doing it live in page. I would generate the target HTML page and write it out in there, with the head tags and everything! What this resulted in was a WAY too cluttered page, and I couldn't focus on my writing.
</p>
<h2>My style HTML</h2>
<p>
What I've landed on is a very curated list of semantic tags that I use when writing my posts. It's honestly, the same subset that you'd get from markdown:
</p>
<pre>
<article>
<h1>Post Title!</h1>
<p>
Some post body
</p>
<h2>Another section</h2>
<p> Some more content </p>
</article></pre>
<p> Now this might seem a bit… overdone… but I find the HTML tree that I am building keeps me honest about when to add paragraph breaks, when to make a separate section, etc. I didn't hate how the markdown generator outputs HTML. It's fairly straightforward and I could easily just wrap it in an article tag before dropping it into my page template. But since the other target for a good chunk of these articles is also gemini, rarely would something on my HTTP blog not go to gemini, I found that going from HTML → gemtext is easier (mentally) than going from gemtext → HTML.
</p>
<h2>HTML vs Gemtext</h2>
<p>
Maybe easier is the wrong word. For my brain, stripping away is easier than building something up. HTML allows me to be more expressive with things like audio links and potentially my images. Gemtext those are just links to media files, which is great! But it's a different, fixed, paradigm. I could detect "Oh this is a .ogg so let me capture the alt-text make that the figure caption and then print out the whole figure tag". I could. But it's frankly easier for my brain to see a figure and then disregard 90% of what I wrote and just grab the link and then the alt-text for the link description in gemtext. I will still write with the express intention of posting this to gemini, meaning avoiding things like text formatting and such, but that's more of a writing preference. I've done my best to leave emphasis up to the reader. I use text styling around the webpage but in the content of my articles, I do my best to take that ethos that gemini pushes and live by it. Plus I don't see myself really outlinking much within the what I write. And I can easily just do the gemini paradigm of dropping the link below.
</p>
<h2>Conclusion: I'm weird</h2>
<p>
Frankly, I may be the last person in the world who loves writing HTML. I like it. And so be-it. I was thinking, as I got the the conclusion "does this make sense on gemini?" and yeah it does! I'll put a link to my HTTP blog in there, which will be funny, considering if you read this on HTTP then like… well you know where to fine me already! But hey it's interesting to me!
</p>
<p>
I spend days trying to sort out how I wanted to redesign my personal site, and combine the generation of my gemini capsule and website, and since they will, mostly, be sharing posts, I needed to pick what I wanted to write my articles in.
</p>
</article>
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