html2gemtext - A simple library for converting HTML to Gemtext

Yesterday evening, while tinkering with Rogallo, I managed to nerd-snipe myself pretty well. I was playing around with the idea of better presentation of some forms of text/* content. While, of course, Rogallo handles text/gemtext just fine, there are lots of other MIME types that it will show too (pretty much all within text/*). Already, if it can work out an appropriate language, the viewer will do syntax highlighting, and this includes Markdown files. However, Rogallo has a full Markdown widget built right in so I was experimenting with using that as the way to show Markdown content.

Nothing that clever really, all pretty obvious.

But then I got to thinking... In OldNews I heavily rely on html-to-markdown. Given I have a Markdown viewer to hand, if the user ends up trying to look at some text/html, why not convert it over to Markdown and render it that way? That's... doable.

There are, however, some problems with this idea:

• As useful as html-to-markdown has been for OldNews, I've found it quite unreliable at times, with the occasional breaking change. I don't mention this as a negative about the project, but I don't want another one of my projects sitting on top of a moving target like that.
• Dragging in a reasonably large dependency for what's likely to be a niche requirement doesn't quite feel right.
• Textual's Markdown viewer has, to this day, one massive design flaw: links can't be navigated with the keyboard¹. I'm doing my absolute best to ensure that Rogallo is keyboard-first. Leaning on this widget for viewing Markdown is one thing, but leaning on the widget for other content types starts to erode that aim.

I did consider the idea of having this feature as an install option, so you'd be able to install rogallo and have it work as normal, or install rogallo[html] (or similar) and it would drag in the ability to render some HTML using this pipeline.

Then I realised: why target Markdown at all? I already have the code for rendering Gemtext, and that solves the keyboard navigation of links problem. How hard could it be to write something to convert HTML to Gemtext?

Turns out, at least for the requirements I have right now, not that hard!

html2gemtext is still in its infancy, but it's doing a passable job of turning most of the HTML I throw at it into reasonable Gemtext. I don't doubt for a moment that there are lots of pages out there that won't turn out right -- for varied values of right -- but so far the results are readable and navigable. The plan now is to keep improving as I run into new cases that could be handled better.

While I've not built this into Rogallo just yet, I think I will make use of it. I'm also giving serious thought to using it for my capsule. Over there I'm adding some posts from this blog and html2gemtext could form the basis of a tool to help automate some of that.

Right now I'm using a script I've written that wraps lowdown to do the Markdown to Gemtext conversion, but the result -- as good as it is -- isn't quite what I'd like. I'm thinking I could tailor the results exactly as I want if I go from this blog's HTML via html2gemtext.

Or, of course, given my blog is written in Markdown, I could next tackle my own just-how-I-need-it Markdown to Gemtext converter...

As for how this new library will go into Rogallo... Using it to render HTML that might be found kicking about in Geminispace or Gopherspace makes sense, I think. That should be enough. It's not like I really need to turn it into an http(s) browser too. Right? Right?!?