I'm a fan of Lynx. React and angular have destroyed the semantic web.
Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites
91–100 of 198 posts
Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites
#92HN is the only place on the Internet where I hear about Gemini. Excluding Gemini itself. I'm all in for a simpler Internet, but on HTTP(S), with images and other media if needed
Yeah, gemini is way to simple, its unpractical.
Being unpractical is the point. It's unpractical to implement tracking, anything beyond simple ads, websites with flashy or distracting designs, picture-in-picture video autoplay like news websites often do, popups, moving banners, and RAM/CPU heavy client-side scripting (or any client-side scripting, for that matter). So your website will have to do without that.
And that is by design. Gemini is designed to exclude those features, because the target audience of this protocol wants to browse a web where those features are impossible to include.
Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites
#93Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dunno, the gemini protocol and gemtext format is like the internet equivalent of a 6502. It's extremely approachable to anyone with a basic understanding of programming. Like you could slap together a working client or a server in an afternoon, most likely. Its built-in limitations also inspires quite a lot of creativity.
That's make it just a toy
You say that, but plenty of old computers were based on the 6502. Those were used both for play and for real work. Before the time of resource-heavy network protocols, they could even host and access BBS systems (for those unfamiliar, basically a precursor of the Internet).
Gemini cannot do a lot (which is by design), but it also has huge capabilities. For instance, while client-side logic is impossible, there's nothing preventing you from writing a "web app" that does its logic on the server side. Yes, you would require page refreshes to update what the client sees, but with Gemini each page load is much, much cheaper than HTML because the response payload is smaller to transfer and easier to parse.
Assuming that your Gemini client allows enabling inline images, there's absolutely no reason why you couldn't build a stateful web-app that is a clone of Twitter, Facebook or another social media site. There's no reason why you couldn't design a simple webmail client a la Gmail, or a system monitoring dashboard, or a bug tracker, or basically anything else that doesn't have to rely on complex layouts or inline video to do its job.
Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Dunno, the gemini protocol and gemtext format is like the internet equivalent of a 6502. It's extremely approachable to anyone with a basic understanding of programming. Like you could slap together a working client or a server in an afternoon, most likely. Its built-in limitations also inspires quite a lot of creativity.
That's make it just a toy
It’s disheartening to see so many posts like this on ‘Hacker’News. It doesn’t have to be some big, serious thing for people to either enjoy or find useful.
Some people had an idea, went out, and made it a reality, built a small community around it and now we have Gemini.
We should encourage such things. Projects don’t need to change the world and they don’t need to be useful to all people or exploitable by corporations. Building something because it’s fun, or because you want it to exist is good enough.
Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites
#95The scrolling direction for some reason is inverted. If I grab the scrollbar and drag it down with a mouse, it drags up. Is this made for an iPad?
Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites
#96I'm a fan of Lynx. React and angular have destroyed the semantic web.
Love Lynx and not particularly fond about JS or responsive frameworks. But I do not understand what React or Angular could have contributed that would be incompatible counter to or otherwise could have hampered the semantic web — so far as that would have ever been a viable thing is the first place.
Can you elaborate on how react and angular have destroyed the semantic web?
Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites
#97What's this for only gemini? It seems to not support http, https or gopher even though it kinda mention them ? Also seems to just segfault when loading a gemini site..
You have to enable gopher in its preferences, I assume the same is true for http.
Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's more than one web out there. Gopher and HTTP used to be about as popular. Now we have other protocols like Spartan[0]. 0. https://gemini.yesterweb.org/proxy/spartan.mozz.us/
I am absolutely in love with how spartan solved the input problem (prompt line), I wish gemini would also adopt the same function/tag
I avoided direct mention of Gemini for a reason: I am not a fan.
Got nothing against the idea. It is about the implementation. I care about retro hardware and minimizing requirements; they don't.
Spartan is cool.
Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites
#99I don’t think I’ve ever seen HN react so negatively to a project, but I think that has to do with the image people have of what a “browser” is.
Kristall isn’t very useful for HTTP even though it supports the protocol. That said its goal is the “small internet” and very basic sites on HTTP will work, which is is inline with that goal. Some have complained even Google search doesn’t work, but Google search doesn’t fall under the umbrella of “small internet”.
When it comes to Gopher and Gemini it’s far more useful, but only a small community of people use either in 2023 so that’s not going to appeal to most people here, even though that’s the primary use case of the project.
Re: Kristall – a browser without support for CSS/JS/WASM or graphical websites
#100I remember there was an ascii-only browser called Lynx (I think?). What happened to that?