Emphasis has to be earned
With no way to set a word in bold, stress has to come from word order and from what you choose to say. A sentence that needs a bold word to land is usually a sentence that has not decided what it is about. The format will not let you paper over that, so you rewrite it instead.
The same goes for the aside in parentheses that wants to be a footnote. There are no footnotes. Either the thought belongs in the paragraph or it belongs in a different paragraph, and deciding which is the writing.
A link is a whole line
This is the constraint with the widest blast radius. A link cannot sit inside a sentence, so every link stands alone with its own label — which means every label has to make sense read aloud, out of context, by somebody who cannot see what surrounds it.
That is exactly what accessibility guidelines ask of link text at their strictest level, arrived at here by accident rather than by effort. The format made the rule unavoidable before anyone thought to argue for it.
- Links arrive in runs, so a run of them is a list, and a reader can be told how many there are
- Every target clears a large touch area without any inline exception
- Nothing depends on seeing a typeface change
What it is bad at
It would be dishonest to only list the wins. Gemtext cannot quote its own syntax — a preformatted block is closed by the first fence inside it, so the one thing this page cannot show you is a fence. Tables do not exist. Anything with two axes has to become prose or a picture.
And the format has no place to put metadata, which is why the date on this post lives in the link line that points at it rather than in the file you are reading.
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