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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)

#121

Post by selfhoster11 »

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.

I kind of agree with him, despite being of the opinion that optional inline images should be allowed by the spec. Fetching favicons is going a bit too far for my tastes.

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

#122

Post by tester34 »

tdeck wrote: post #38

When I was in high school, I was part of an online community that wrote graphical shells for DOS (really NTVDM) in QBasic. One of the things we all started to want was a web browser, but most of us had no idea how to write a parser, let alone deal with the complexities of HTML and JavaScript. So we created our own markup language, where each "tag" was on it's own line, with the first character indicating the type of…

>but most of us had no idea how to write a parser, let alone deal with the complexities of HTML and JavaScript.

>a search engine

how did that search engine work?

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

#123

Post by soapdog »

Semiapies wrote: post #107

This all seemed interesting at first, but the more I look at Gemini, the more I shrug and say, "Why not just build some text web sites without ads or trackers?" Literally millions of those exist, some dating back to the first eta of the web that every geek my age or older seems nostalgic for. (Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being…

Gemini is not about the pages without JS and stuff. Gemini for me and many other people is about having a specification that is simple enough that normal people can implement clients and servers from scratch and have fun doing it.

You can keep the whole spec in your head. You can develop both clients and servers from scratch just by leveraging some network and TLS libraries. It is friendly to retrocomputers that are able to do TLS but not beefy enough to run the Web.

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

#124

Post by krapp »

mattlondon wrote: post #119
Semiapies wrote: post #107

This all seemed interesting at first, but the more I look at Gemini, the more I shrug and say, "Why not just build some text web sites without ads or trackers?" Literally millions of those exist, some dating back to the first eta of the web that every geek my age or older seems nostalgic for. (Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being…

Non-american, non-white, and non-males were using the internet back in the early 90s too! Can't vouch for prior to that but there was at least one :) I think of it as more of a "childhood memories" type thing rather than a bias thing - just like for a child everything they see is novel and new and interesting to them because they've not encountered it before. The internet was the same for a lot of us in the early day…

Except the web of the 90s had quirky stylesheets and images and pages longer than a couple of paragraphs. Almost everything people miss about the old web is Considered Harmful on Gemini.

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

#125

Post by krapp »

severak_cz wrote: post #116
cyounkins wrote: post #63

Is extensibility really the Pandora's box the author makes it out to be? Just because something is extensible doesn't mean it has to be extended in monstrous ways.

Gemini is not extensible by design.

Gemini is not extensible by intent. There's no such thing as a protocol not extensible by design. Nature... will find a way.

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

#126

Post by soapdog »

People here saying they'd rather use just text-only HTML, or HTML+CSS sans JS, don't understand that what attracts people to Gemini is the ease of implementation.

The main quality of Gemini is that it is easy to understand and implement thus allowing normal developers to create clients and servers from scratch with minimal fuss.

You can actually keep the whole spec in your head which is no longer something anyone can do with the Web stack. What goes on inside a WebView? There is no single person that can reimplement all of that alone anymore, it is too big, too complex. Meanwhile Gemini is so simple that people like me can craft a simple browser in a couple hours.

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

#127

Post by abrazame »

Semiapies wrote: post #107

This all seemed interesting at first, but the more I look at Gemini, the more I shrug and say, "Why not just build some text web sites without ads or trackers?" Literally millions of those exist, some dating back to the first eta of the web that every geek my age or older seems nostalgic for. (Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being…

> Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being a white, male American geek

As someone who doesn’t fit into that pigeon hole, and whose friends mostly don’t either, it’s so disheartening to read essentialist assumptions like these. We liked the Internet better back then too!

You’re taking something that’s objectively good, and saying it’s associated with white people, and implying that’s bad. So not only do we collectively lose the objectively good thing (because it’s now guilty by association of racism - the greatest social crime of our day), but you’re also erasing non-white contributions to that good thing. It’s an own goal all round.

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

#129

Post by goodpoint »

knowledge-clay wrote: post #45
sodality2 wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Restricting Gemini to just long-form text (one way consumption) is really reducing the possibilities Gemini can have, IMO. Though the whole minimalist attitude would probably preclude most of them.

> reducing the possibilities Gemini can have Gemini is all about reducing possibilities. If you want more possibilities, use the web IMO

No, we are talking about reducing security here.

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

#130

Post by goodpoint »

cheesetable wrote: post #13
cortesoft wrote: post #8

I don't quite get this... it sounds like the author mostly has issues with the HTML part of the web, but much of this seems to focus on the HTTP part.... why not keep http and just make a replacement for HTML? Writing an http server is very simple, too

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.

There is nothing Gemini can do to prevent people from adding complexity on top of it.

It's exactly how the web evolved. It did not have activex/java applets/flash/javascript at the beginning.

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