11–20 of 113 posts
Markdown is way better IMO, also very simple yet allowing for better visuals and more expressivness, and new protocol should be designed to use it as its text format.
I think the gemini format is attempting to make it possible to basically render the document line by line.
This protocol looks like someone didn't exactly know how HTTP worked, and more importantly, from where the bloat came from, then tried to do something too simple. Then went on not understanding why people value Markdown, and do something entirely worse, without any good reason.
Gemini is Gopher with TLS and without the Gopher document types.
The high-level criticism, which is that Gemini's specification is too loose and vague, seems very, very convincing, even if the specifics aren't. In a subtle way, this is a significant hurdle for any competitors to the HTTP world. They have to overcome 30 years of technical debate and refinement as ambiguities have been hammered down.
I agree. I think a lot of the problem can be solved with discipline rather than a new spec entirely. If HTTP offers features that are offensive or unwanted, simply don't use those features. Make an HTTP server and client that only implement a subset of HTTP. Then use a subset of HTML, or another content type entirely. This means anyone still using a popular browser like Chrome can visit your sites, but people using a…
The goal would be entirely achievable using your suggestion, but then you can't make something "simple" and "elegant".
Of course don't take my cynicism to mean that people shouldn't invent new things - they totally should, that's how we move forward. Mess around all you like. I just don't see it catching on. But I think that's not really the goal anyway.
> Gemini documents certainly are never visually very attractive As a proponent of the Gemini protocol, I take issue with this line. The Gemtext format is a minimal markup format for text documents. It's a way of semantically indicating "this part is plaintext", "this part is a link", "this part is a header". Unlike HTML/CSS, it does not provide a mechanism for the author to style their documents. Instead, it is up to…
> As a proponent of the Gemini protocol, I take issue with this line. The Gemtext format is a minimal markup format for text documents. It's a way of semantically indicating "this part is plaintext", "this part is a link", "this part is a header". Unlike HTML/CSS, it does not provide a mechanism for the author to style their documents. Instead, it is up to the client to render the text document, however the client ch…
The biggest problem with Markdown is that the vast majority of Markdown libraries convert Markdown to HTML. These are of course useless to implementing a native client that isn't based on HTML. (In addition, the CommonMark test suite is concerned with defining the correct HTML to output for a given Markdown input.)
So while Gemtext is heavily inspired by Markdown, there's no reason to introduce a reliance on Markdown.
Markdown is way better IMO, also very simple yet allowing for better visuals and more expressivness, and new protocol should be designed to use it as its text format.
> Gemini documents certainly are never visually very attractive As a proponent of the Gemini protocol, I take issue with this line. The Gemtext format is a minimal markup format for text documents. It's a way of semantically indicating "this part is plaintext", "this part is a link", "this part is a header". Unlike HTML/CSS, it does not provide a mechanism for the author to style their documents. Instead, it is up to…
> As a proponent of the Gemini protocol, I take issue with this line. The Gemtext format is a minimal markup format for text documents. It's a way of semantically indicating "this part is plaintext", "this part is a link", "this part is a header". Unlike HTML/CSS, it does not provide a mechanism for the author to style their documents. Instead, it is up to the client to render the text document, however the client ch…
"a satisfactory rendering can be achieved with a single pass of a document, processing each line independently" - from what I understand of Markdown parsing, it's a lot more complex than this because of the spec.
> There appears to not even be a support for a basic table
Given the number of Markdown table attempts I've seen over the years, I don't blame them for wanting to avoid that plague pit. Plus then rendering tables is another hellscape of torment.
Markdown is way better IMO, also very simple yet allowing for better visuals and more expressivness, and new protocol should be designed to use it as its text format.
The problem with markdown, as I understand it, is that it's not possible to correctly render without reading the entire document. I think the gemini format is attempting to make it possible to basically render the document line by line.
If you leave off the ending * then everything till the last line will be bold, for example.
That’s gemtext though. Mandatory TLS on the gem protocol makes most of this moot IMO. It’s 10x harder to view a gemtext document in a gemini browser. What simplicity did we gain with markdown--?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I agree. I think a lot of the problem can be solved with discipline rather than a new spec entirely. If HTTP offers features that are offensive or unwanted, simply don't use those features. Make an HTTP server and client that only implement a subset of HTTP. Then use a subset of HTML, or another content type entirely. This means anyone still using a popular browser like Chrome can visit your sites, but people using a…
Some people hate what has become of the current thing so much that they want to throw all of it away. This is that. The goal would be entirely achievable using your suggestion, but then you can't make something "simple" and "elegant". Of course don't take my cynicism to mean that people shouldn't invent new things - they totally should, that's how we move forward. Mess around all you like. I just don't see it catchin…
It being too basic and rigid to the point of hostility towards anything but pure text is the entire point.
Markdown is way better IMO, also very simple yet allowing for better visuals and more expressivness, and new protocol should be designed to use it as its text format.
Gemtext is weird, it’s hyper-focused on a very specific form of text publishing. It’s not trying to be “old internet” featuring the creative freedom of its users, it’s just text content and that’s it. Not even inline links or images! Which I personally think makes it a bad format for the old-internet mainstay of “website about one specific interest of mine”. I run a little capsule but I find myself with not much to d…
> Gemini documents certainly are never visually very attractive As a proponent of the Gemini protocol, I take issue with this line. The Gemtext format is a minimal markup format for text documents. It's a way of semantically indicating "this part is plaintext", "this part is a link", "this part is a header". Unlike HTML/CSS, it does not provide a mechanism for the author to style their documents. Instead, it is up to…
>This scheme is syntactically compatible with the generic URI syntax defined in RFC 3986
^ that defines the percent encoding scheme.
About the only way I can think of is if Gemini URLs are a superset, and don't need to use percent encoding... but that means ambiguity when someone hands you a percent-encoded URL. Did they mean %C5 or %C5?