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What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

drewdevault.com

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Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#81

Post by chipotle_coyote »

Daegalus wrote: post #64

Gemini is great, but I'm would love one step up from this. html/css support, no JS. or Markdown with CSS styling or something that's just a little more than plain text but still close. I've been meaning to try and make my own browser that only supports html/css or Markdown and maybe its own protocol like Gemini's I'll add it to my ever growing Todo list.

Gemini's text specification is kind of a subset of Markdown -- it supports three levels of headings, block quotes, bulleted (but not numbered) lists, preformatted text, and links (but not inline links).

While I'm a fan of richer text styling -- I'm often the dingus on HN being downvoted for suggesting that web fonts are not an intrinsically bad thing -- I think Gemini is mostly just fine the way it is. The thing that's kind of a blocker for me is, of all things, no way to emphasize inline text. Changing text from regular to italic/oblique carries semantic meaning. If you could mark it with _underlines_ like Markdown, for instance, it could be just like some of the other Gemini text that's described as "strictly optional for clients to do anything special with".

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#82

Post by Seirdy »

ronsor wrote: post #16
advisedwang wrote: post #12

I understand the desire to use trust-on-first-use to get rid of certificate authorities (some of the most dispicable and untrustworthy organizations around, and the largest security hole in TLS). However trust-on-first-use basically hands any long-term man-in-the-middle a complete victory. Authoritarian regimes are going to require ISPs to mitm every connection from first use, and hand over whatever data is desired t…

Trust on first use combined with preloaded public key lists is the best of both worlds in my opinion. You may say that browsers made in authoritarian countries would sabotage the preload lists, but they could also bundle illegitimate CAs or break HTTPS in other ways anyway.

Another option would be something similar to Go's sum database, but with something like a DHT instead of a hosted centralized service.

Or perhaps instead of a DHT, users could export all their certs to a file and combine/compare entries in a grassroots manner with each other and with devices on different networks.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#83

Post by Andrex »

tadfisher wrote: post #79
Andrex wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If people specifically sought out your client because it automatically renders images inline, who could be bothered to get upset about a "spec violation"? The author of Gemini? What would he be able to do? Honestly asking because I'm curious.

Drew himself threatened to block a Gemini agent that fetched /favicon.png on every page load. I tend to agree with the idea that Gemini should not be extended, as there's always HTTP+HTML for that.

That's disappointing to hear. It breaks what I would expect from the project's purported server-agent separation. What about user choice?

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#84

Post by savolai »

knowledge-clay wrote: post #62
sodality2 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fair. I certainly think that type of simplistic Gemini has a place in the world. But I think ">If you want more possibilities, use the web IMO" goes against the minimalist ethos of Gemini as well; I don't want something as bloated as the web, but perhaps I do want a comment section of my posts? I think that's not too bloated to be thrown in with the rest of the web. But it might very well be too bloated to throw into…

With Gemini, the philosophy of intentional austerity means that everyone is going to be a bit unhappy, and want some feature added to it. Its "incompleteness" is a necessary consequence of its design philosophy -- it calls on us to accept it "as-is" rather than try and extend the spec. A mailing list for comments, as you describe, would be more "gemini philosophy". This is what the author does: => https://lists.sr.ht…

I find it laudable you're openly admitting making users unhappy.

Of course, what's "added" and what's "simple" is a political value choice in an of itself.

Using a mailing list for comments sounds like "returning to the golden days when we didn't need to take non-techies people seriously but could tell them what to use their cognitive capacity for" i.e. to learn arcane UI that never even tried to really take into account all the learnings of Human-computer interaction about how learning and cognition works.

It really doesn't sound like there's been an actual critical discussion taking into account the needs of a substantial array of potential users. Instead the design seems like a reactive wish to return to olden days.

Which is okay of course, just how it's presentes seems skewed in a very particular way.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#85

Post by Seirdy »

Andrex wrote: post #72
Daegalus wrote: post #64

Gemini is great, but I'm would love one step up from this. html/css support, no JS. or Markdown with CSS styling or something that's just a little more than plain text but still close. I've been meaning to try and make my own browser that only supports html/css or Markdown and maybe its own protocol like Gemini's I'll add it to my ever growing Todo list.

Nothing stopping you from turning off JS in your web browser. ;) I have, and whitelist the sites that really need it.

If I see an http(s) URL, I have no idea whether I'll have to play whack-a-mole with selective attack-surface expansion (enabling JS, media, SVG, third-party JS, or JIT) for a rich text document to load.

If I see a gemini:// link, I know in advance that a singe download will give me a single readable page, and that it probably won't make my old laptop's fans spin or kill my battery. This significantly improves usability.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#86

Post by paxys »

II2II wrote: post #60
LeoPanthera wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People, or businesses, that you know in real life could exchange certificate hashes in person. This is one of those things that usually garners the response "normal people would never do that", but honestly I'm surprised that no-one has even tried. Let's say that web browsers put a short hash of the certificate right in the URL bar. Amazon, for example, could print its hash on every shipping box. Banks could print th…

Many years ago, I was put into a situation where I had to start using online banking. Being skeptical about security, I asked for something along the lines of a certificate hash that could be verified in person. They couldn't answer that. So I tried asking how I could verify that the certificate displayed by the web browser was correct. They couldn't answer that. In the end, I ended up trusting the padlock icon and b…

I think it was more that a random bank teller could not be expected to explain the intricacies of certificate authorities and online encryption. The bank likely has a security whitepaper on their website which explains all this.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#87

Post by Seirdy »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #5

I'm a bit annoyed with the lack of _some_ inline image support. but making a browser for gemini is really really easy at least.

Lots of people have been spreading misinfo that Gemini doesn't support inline images.

Gemini doesn't support auto-downloading of inline linked content. You click an image to load, and the image can be displayed inline if you choose a client that does so.

That image can load inline, in a new window, be printed out twenty niles away and delivered by carrier pigeons, etc; presentation is up to the client.

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#88

Post by thewakalix »

LeoPanthera wrote: post #68
zem wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like whatever scheme you use, if it is too simple there won't be enough unique keys to go around, but if it is complex enough it can be subtly changed in ways a human would find hard to notice.

Isn't the whole point of a hash that you can't "subtly" change it?

Would you notice if someone changed the "f" in the middle of that onion link to an "l"?

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#89

Post by thewakalix »

BrightGlow wrote: post #43
toomuchtodo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think useless and annoying are the wrong words here. It’s elegant in that efforts to extend it beyond its purpose are self defeating. It’s a Chinese finger trap for those who would attempt to embrace and extend for adtech and corp subversion. I love it.

That's not really true though, myself or anyone else could fork Gemini right now and add a lot of "unwanted" features to it. The only reason nobody will follow through on that is because everyone who cares about those features is already using the web and has no reason to add them to Gemini. In that sense Gemini has skipped past the "embrace and extend" and moved itself right to "extinguish", which actually seems to…

Avoid success, at all costs!

Re: What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

#90

Post by cheesetable »

zchrykng wrote: post #21
cheesetable wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HTTP supports extensibility via HTTP headers and methods. Gemini to not be evolved: * HTTP is now for interactivity, complex clients, WebGL, Webassembly, ... * Gemini is for a segregated simpler web: links and text.

And Gemini being its own stand-alone thing that is different from everything is a serious hindrance for people to try it. I've read Drew's stuff for a while and even wanted to test out Gemini out of interest, but it is really annoying/frustrating to use in my experience. And that is even before you get to the fact that there is nearly nothing there and/or it is nearly impossible. to find.

That's a fair critique.

I expect the designers foresaw this.

I don't think wide popularity was a goal.

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