Interesting project, but can't we already do this with an ordinary browser?
The modern web still supports lightweight pages (like HackerNews).
Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
41–50 of 79 posts
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#42Interesting project, but can't we already do this with an ordinary browser? The modern web still supports lightweight pages (like HackerNews).
from https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt
> In particular, Gemini strives for simplicity of client implementation. Modern web browsers are so complicated that they can only be developed by very large and expensive projects. This naturally leads to a very small number of near-monopoly browsers, which stiffles innovation and diversity and allows the developers of these browsers to dictate the direction in which the web evolves.
...
> Experiments suggest that a very basic interactive client takes more like a minimum of 100 lines of code, and a comfortable fit and moderate feature completeness need more like 200 lines. But Gemini still seems to be in the ballpark of these goals.
...
> Gemini is designed with an acute awareness that the modern web is a privacy disaster, and that the internet is not a safe place for plaintext. Things like browser fingerprinting and Etag-based "supercookies" are an important cautionary tale: user tracking can and will be snuck in via the backdoor using protocol features which were not designed to facilitate it. Thus, protocol designers must not only avoid designing in tracking features (which is easy), but also assume active malicious intent and avoid designing anything which could be subverted to provide effective tracking. This concern manifests as a deliberate non-extensibility in many parts of the Gemini protocol.
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#43For anyone curious, because Gemini is relatively new and kind of has flown under the radar: ### 1.1 What is Gemini? Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between files. Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design…
From an implementor's view I decided to not implement Gemini as it is specified, because I do not like its text/gemini default format. They should either decide for a specified full file format, e.g. CommonMark or HTML5 (with index.html as default routes) or don't try to implement a file format inside a network protocol at all. In my opinion, file structures (and layouts thereof) should have nothing to do with a netw…
> The reason why the web exploded was because ...
Depends on which big bang you talk about.
Gopher lost to HTML because Gopher was TUI-oriented when HTML was GUI-oriented. And Gopher lost a second time when Web 2.0 (JS expansion) occurred.
TUI is not so vastly inferior to GUI - at least when it comes to reading and writing and sparse multimedia contents. The Web exploded because GUI appears to be more user-friendly. There are vastly more users that need "friendliness" than users that just need honesty ;-)
In my mind, if one wants to suggest an alternative to the Web, one either has to go back to the passive, text-oriented web or one-up the current Web with something even more interactive and even more graphical.
In my opinion the only way to achieve successfully the latter is to provide a much easier way to make remote interactive graphical applications, with strong security guarantees of course. I believe that something like Squeak could do that job. It kind of already was done with Croquet/Cobalt.
As for the former approach, I would suggest 80 columns monospace text as the standard document format, with the footnote-style convention for links - not some oddity that's midway between text and HTML.
So in both case I think one has to be extreme in order to succeed. Either extreme sophistication or extreme simplicity.
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#44Interesting project, but can't we already do this with an ordinary browser? The modern web still supports lightweight pages (like HackerNews).
from https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt > In particular, Gemini strives for simplicity of client implementation. Modern web browsers are so complicated that they can only be developed by very large and expensive projects. This naturally leads to a very small number of near-monopoly browsers, which stiffles innovation and diversity and allows the developers of these browsers to dictate the direction in whic…
Perfect, thanks.
It seems to me these goals could be achieved while retaining browser compatibility. Just define a strict, automatically verifiable subset of the modern web stack. This could be privacy-friendly, and support easy implementation, while making it enormously more approachable, no?
How does their transport protocol stack up against HTTPS/TLS? Is there unnecessary complexity that can be avoided by reinventing the wheel here?
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#45I went through the docs of gemini to see an example of how a gemini file should look like, only to realize, that it's a flavour of markdown. Or at least that's what I understood.
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
from https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.txt > In particular, Gemini strives for simplicity of client implementation. Modern web browsers are so complicated that they can only be developed by very large and expensive projects. This naturally leads to a very small number of near-monopoly browsers, which stiffles innovation and diversity and allows the developers of these browsers to dictate the direction in whic…
Perfect, thanks. It seems to me these goals could be achieved while retaining browser compatibility. Just define a strict, automatically verifiable subset of the modern web stack. This could be privacy-friendly, and support easy implementation, while making it enormously more approachable, no? How does their transport protocol stack up against HTTPS/TLS? Is there unnecessary complexity that can be avoided by reinvent…
I agree it would be nicer to have a subset of HTTP and HTML/CSS (not sure if JS could ever be made safe) but as cookies show, the simple fact that headers exist in HTTP and can be extended, makes it a privacy-problematic protocol from the start.
The transport protocol used by Gemini is protected via TLS, just like HTTPS. It has the great advantage that the only way for a user to identify itself is by using mutual TLS, which is basically the only 100% secure way to do it (the fact that it's impossible to use mutual TLS on the web tells a lot about the incentives going on there). Gemini absolutely does not re-invent the wheel here.
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#47For anyone curious, because Gemini is relatively new and kind of has flown under the radar: ### 1.1 What is Gemini? Gemini is a new application-level internet protocol for the distribution of arbitrary files, with some special consideration for serving a lightweight hypertext format which facilitates linking between files. Gemini is intended to be simple, but not necessarily as simple as possible. Instead, the design…
From an implementor's view I decided to not implement Gemini as it is specified, because I do not like its text/gemini default format. They should either decide for a specified full file format, e.g. CommonMark or HTML5 (with index.html as default routes) or don't try to implement a file format inside a network protocol at all. In my opinion, file structures (and layouts thereof) should have nothing to do with a netw…
I agree on the own text format. It just seems needlessly complicated without really offering benefits.
The argument of focusing on text over styling is a fair one, but it would also have been easy to only support a subset of HTML/CSS.
If one has to create a new format for Hypertext, it should however do more than HTML does and really innovate on the concept. That would have been interesting, to make it for example more semantically structured and thus open new possibilities or include ideas from other Hypertext projects like Xanadu.
As it stands, I would prefer markdown or just plain html as well.
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#48Hi there, I'm the maintainer of Castor, if you have questions feel free to ask! I also make a ncurses command line client Asuka https://git.sr.ht/~julienxx/asuka
Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#49Re: Castor: A browser for the small internet (Gemini, Gopher, Finger)
#50What gtk theme are you using? It looks so old school
It's a ripoff of NsCDE Irix theme https://github.com/NsCDE/NsCDE