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

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

#201

Post by Lammy »

zzo38computer wrote: post #196
Lammy wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Personally I've come to believe none of it matters and that encryption is a total waste of time, at least for the kind of stuff I would want to publish using Gemini (long-form text) where there's nothing interactive or user-specific in any request. Just the act of making a network connection gives away who you are, where you are, when you are online, and what you're reading: https://kieranhealy.org/blog/archives/2013…

What I think is that a "insecure-gemini:" scheme should be added, which is the same except without TLS and 6x response is not allowed (if a client certificate is required, it must redirect to the protocol with TLS).

"pollux://"

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

#202

Post by dmitriid »

cortesoft wrote: post #199
dmitriid wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's all concerning the content though Ah yes. Just the content. Including things like WebUSB, WebHID, and a bunch of others. > You could fairly easily make your own web browser that uses HTTP and only reads (gem)text files and ignore the rest of the web. Yes, you probably could. And it wouldn't work with most of the web.

You are again conflating HTTP and 'the web'. The stuff you are talking about for web browsers has nothing to do with the HTTP protocol. In fact, many many things use HTTP that are not part of `the web`. Most APIs these days are HTTP based, but do not exchange HTML or any web content.

> You are again conflating HTTP and 'the web'

I'm not. It's you, who keep saying that the author's gripe is with HTML, content, HTTP and what not. It's not.

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

#203

Post by doublepg23 »

skybrian wrote: post #10

What’s something interesting to read that’s on Gemini?

I've already made a Gemini friend on gemini://station.martinrue.com/ (I think one of the benefits is the self-selecting people you meet in Gemini Space) he has lead me to gemini://cosmic.voyage which is a collaborative creative writing exercise and gemini://konpeito.media/ which is an exclusive Gemini mixtape.

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

#204

Post by tenebrisalietum »

Karrot_Kream wrote: post #180
tenebrisalietum wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why not just build some text web sites without ads or trackers? If I am visiting a site I've never visited before, I have no guarantee what it will do or try to do until I load it/use it. Yes there are ways to control what sites do but the ways to block or manage them always seem to be changing and require keeping up on plugins, whitelists, extensions, which browser is better this week, which NewFeatureKit or Turni…

> We can have an inclusive Internet without this bullshit. We can but it won't be Gemini. Gemini has fought _tooth and nail_ against accessibility and accessibility metadata. And Geminauts still mostly produce GMI files even though Gemini says nothing about distributing only GMI files. The early Gemini days had optimism about using screen readers to view pages, but that went nowhere. The mailing list has consistently…

Gemini is really just anti-metadata in general. We don't even get anything resembling a Content-Length header because supporting delimiters can lead to extensibility which can lead to tracking mechanisms like cookies and ETags.

So educate me: since Gemini has limited formatting and is text-only, why can't a screen reader just read you the text? I'm admittedly ignorant here because I don't have vision-related needs, but to me the fact that you can depend on a .GMI document to be text only would make it seem like screen or text reader software could easily handle it.

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

#205

Post by Karrot_Kream »

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #204
Karrot_Kream wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We can have an inclusive Internet without this bullshit. We can but it won't be Gemini. Gemini has fought _tooth and nail_ against accessibility and accessibility metadata. And Geminauts still mostly produce GMI files even though Gemini says nothing about distributing only GMI files. The early Gemini days had optimism about using screen readers to view pages, but that went nowhere. The mailing list has consistently…

Gemini is really just anti-metadata in general. We don't even get anything resembling a Content-Length header because supporting delimiters can lead to extensibility which can lead to tracking mechanisms like cookies and ETags. So educate me: since Gemini has limited formatting and is text-only, why can't a screen reader just read you the text? I'm admittedly ignorant here because I don't have vision-related needs, b…

> So educate me: since Gemini has limited formatting and is text-only, why can't a screen reader just read you the text?

In practice there's a lot of stuff that isn't just plain text. Things like embedded Figlet images for one. And languages for the other; UTF-8 makes it trivial to switch languages, but how do you get the screen reader to change which language it's reading? That's usually the problem. Plain-text fans, like CLI fans, often claim it's easy to wrap things or display things in other formats, but in practice, only other techie workflows actually become well supported. That's also why most Geminauts are techies.

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

#206

Post by gnubison »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #7

"My disdain for web browsers is well documented1." Ha, I am not the only one. I do like links though, somewhere around 2.3pre2, with stunnel or haproxy for up-to-date TLS. Someone submitted an "improved" version of linenoise the other day, which added UTF-8 and ANSI codes by default. But I prefer to avoid Unicode in the console (cf. terminal, I do not use a graphics layer plus emulator). This is an example of enforci…

> But I prefer to avoid Unicode in the console (cf. terminal, I do not use a graphics layer plus emulator).

Why? If the alternative is garbled text, is that what you choose?

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

#207

Post by __void »

NoGravitas wrote: post #167
chipotle_coyote wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

In the very first days of Gemini's design, I was arguing with other implementers for using a large subset of CommonMark (no raw HTML, no inline images, but pretty much everything else) as the preferred content-type to serve over Gemini. In the end, the goal of ease of implementation for client authors won out. The main arguments were that while there are Markdown parsers for many languages, most of them are narrowly…

I come to think of it, this is a client problem (specifically the client used to write the pages): gemini is natively utf8, bold and italic are present in unicode!

In general, on gemini, all "problems" are with the client and not with the protocol ;)

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

#208

Post by mminer237 »

dmitriid wrote: post #182
mminer237 wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's all concerning the content though. If you don't want HTML and Javascript and video streaming and EPUBs on the web, you don't have to use them. None of that concerns HTTP itself, which is developed by IETF. You could fairly easily make your own web browser that uses HTTP and only reads (gem)text files and ignore the rest of the web. Or just use Lynx. Pushing your own standard seems to only add to the complexity…

> That's all concerning the content though Ah yes. Just the content. Including things like WebUSB, WebHID, and a bunch of others. > You could fairly easily make your own web browser that uses HTTP and only reads (gem)text files and ignore the rest of the web. Yes, you probably could. And it wouldn't work with most of the web.

I still feel like that's better than Gemini, which doesn't work with any of the web.

Text over HTTP:

  - Easy to write browsers
  - Viewable by those browsers
  - Can use other browsers
  - Viewable by everyone else
  - Can only see some other websites
Text over Gemini:

  - Easy to write browsers
  - Viewable by those browsers
  - Cannot use other browsers
  - Not viewable by everyone else
  - Cannot see any other websites
What's the advantage of Gemini again?

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

#209

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

gnubison wrote: post #206
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #7

"My disdain for web browsers is well documented1." Ha, I am not the only one. I do like links though, somewhere around 2.3pre2, with stunnel or haproxy for up-to-date TLS. Someone submitted an "improved" version of linenoise the other day, which added UTF-8 and ANSI codes by default. But I prefer to avoid Unicode in the console (cf. terminal, I do not use a graphics layer plus emulator). This is an example of enforci…

> But I prefer to avoid Unicode in the console (cf. terminal, I do not use a graphics layer plus emulator). Why? If the alternative is garbled text, is that what you choose?

"Why?"

Why not?

"If the alternative is garbled text, is that what you choose?"

No. The alternative is not garbled text and thats not what I choose.

The alternative for me is a subset of ASCII. I choose what characters I will accept, delete the rest.

For example, something like

   tr -cd '[\12\40-\176]'
This has worked for me for several decades. Nor am I the only one who uses this approach. I once saw an HN commenter say their favourite regex was

   tr -cd '[ -~]'

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

#210

Post by gnubison »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #209
gnubison wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But I prefer to avoid Unicode in the console (cf. terminal, I do not use a graphics layer plus emulator). Why? If the alternative is garbled text, is that what you choose?

"Why?" Why not? "If the alternative is garbled text, is that what you choose?" No. The alternative is not garbled text and thats not what I choose. The alternative for me is a subset of ASCII. I choose what characters I will accept, delete the rest. For example, something like tr -cd '[\12\40-\176]' This has worked for me for several decades. Nor am I the only one who uses this approach. I once saw an HN commenter sa…

That’s fair. Is that what links without Unicode support does? (Ignore all byte sequences it doesn’t recognize.) Also, I’d still love to know why you prefer stripping out non-ASCII characters — does this sentence become more readable to you with the em dash omitted?
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