Whitespace, part... 5? ⬜⬜⬜⬜⬜

I was looking for something mildly useful that I could try in Whitespace. "Obviously," I thought, "a Gemini client, because there aren't many of them." But the network communication makes this a no-no. There's no way to open a socket in Whitespace, and if there were, I'm not about to implement TLS. But I can render in Whitespace if I have something that will fetch a page to a file. So I wrote that first.

Then after a lot of faffing in Whitespace assembler with line types and text flow and pausing after every screenful and letting the user pick a link, I now have a (really bad) Gemini client. I can look at Antenna, follow the links, and read posts.

That's happily filled some free moments while I've been off work over Christmas. Apparently some people don't write pointless software in obscure languages for fun. I wonder why not?

Bug list

• Relative links don't work at all
• You can't follow links on the last screen-full (!)
• It dies on non-Gemini URLs
• Pre-formatted sections with very long lines mess up pagination

=> #Whitespace | #programming

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