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Poor Man's Web

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Re: Poor Man's Web

#11

Post by Kamq »

fabianholzer wrote: post #10

I am under the impression that an unstated design objective of gemini was preventing eternal september by trading it off for staying an eternal echo chamber tobe inhabited only by people smart enough to write their own client and server software.

Huh? There's plenty of ready clients and servers.

It's limited to those that are primarily interested in text (and the occasional image). Which probably prevents it from ever going mainstream (and thus an eternal september). What it's generally sacrificing is interactivity.

That seems like it's shooting more for the early internet. Which, yeah, has quite a bit of overlap with people who can code, but not as much as you're implying. And I do remember quite a few echo chambers on the early internet, but I remember a lot less of them without algorithmic feeds. Just by chance, you'd end up running across a bunch of people who disagree with you on a lot of things.

Re: Poor Man's Web

#12

Post by II2II »

troupo wrote: post #3

People keep trying to make Gemini happen. I will keep repeating that in its quest for simplicity Gemini threw the baby out of with the water. Basic styling and inline images are invaluable.

The problem with most of these discussions is they assume Gemini is a substitute for the web, when it is actually a substitute for Gopher.

Gopher never really went away. A few enthusiasts were keeping it alive. Those enthusiasts realized that Gopher had a number of shortcomings, so Gemini was created to address those shortcomings. It was not created to address the shortcomings of the web. (At least not directly. Indirectly one could argue those enthusiasts kept Gopher alive due to the shortcomings of the web.)

As for styling and inline images: in a sense, Gemini offers styles to a limited degree. Those styles are tied to the structure of the document, while the appearance is left to the software rendering the document. Even though inline images are considered a faux pas, I seem to recall Lagrange offering that feature. Again, we are dealing with the rendering software making the decision rather than the author. Since the end user chooses and configures the rendering software, it is the end user who has control (rather than the author).

Re: Poor Man's Web

#13

Post by II2II »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #7
antiframe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that basic styling and in-line images add something, but I like how Gemini strips so much faff out that the prose and links must stand strongly on their own. I've taken to writing my markdown and other documetns simiarly. Cory Doctorow does something similar. https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytim... We don't need Gemini. We can get the feeling of the Smol Web by just choosing an effecti…

> I like how Gemini strips so much faff out that the prose and links must stand strongly on their own. I don't think that's working at all. Their website is so unapproachable bad, that it fails in selling me reasons why I should even care about this or read further. Letting something standing on its own only really works well if you have a small amount to deliver. Any slightly lengthy text will just bury you in a des…

> Any slightly lengthy text will just bury you in a desert of letters.

Is this a bad thing?

Books are a "desert of letters", with little to break the text up outside of chapters, sections, and paragraphs. If you broaden the scope a bit, you can added illustrations and photos. People have been reading books for generations. While many books do break that mould, many books continue to follow that tradition.

Re: Poor Man's Web

#14

Post by guestbest »

arkh wrote: post #4

Gemini protocol using :// again. I feel like more people should watch Dylan Beattle's "The Web that Never Was" presentation. > gem:my.domain.com/hello

Correct me if I’m wrong, but weren’t slashes typically reserved for flags on Unix and back slashes on dos/windows? If that’s the case then surely the vertices line, pipe symbol |, would be the most visually appropriate? Piping remote data over a network connection and through the local client program to parse seems to be the kind of thing bike shedding was intended for, in agreement but focusing on semantics. It just seems new by safe and only requires reprogramming the kernel for the shell semantics.

# gemeni:|bike.domain.com|shed

Or even better, everything is little endian to allow autocomplete from previous entries by the user in the shell so that once the user hits the domain keyword the shell history parser assumes the user wants to stay on the site

# gemeni:|shed|bike|domain|com

I’m not sure how feasible this as I’ve never written an internet or shell language

Re: Poor Man's Web

#15

Post by sircastor »

lproven wrote: post #8
antiframe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that basic styling and in-line images add something, but I like how Gemini strips so much faff out that the prose and links must stand strongly on their own. I've taken to writing my markdown and other documetns simiarly. Cory Doctorow does something similar. https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytim... We don't need Gemini. We can get the feeling of the Smol Web by just choosing an effecti…

Entirely this. I feel that if there were some way of promoting a Javascript-free web, everything the world needs is already there in all modern browsers. I suspect that between HTML5, and indeed XHTML, and CSS and all the many modern image formats and so on, everything important that almost any site needs could be done using these tools and no JS at all. And the result could also be interpreted and rendered successfu…

I think a contest would be antithetical to the idea being circled here. The early web (to me) was filled with content front people who put out there because they wanted to share. Put your page up because here’s something you think is cool. I feel like it loses something with a contest.

Re: Poor Man's Web

#17

Post by ertian »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #7
antiframe wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree that basic styling and in-line images add something, but I like how Gemini strips so much faff out that the prose and links must stand strongly on their own. I've taken to writing my markdown and other documetns simiarly. Cory Doctorow does something similar. https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytim... We don't need Gemini. We can get the feeling of the Smol Web by just choosing an effecti…

> I like how Gemini strips so much faff out that the prose and links must stand strongly on their own. I don't think that's working at all. Their website is so unapproachable bad, that it fails in selling me reasons why I should even care about this or read further. Letting something standing on its own only really works well if you have a small amount to deliver. Any slightly lengthy text will just bury you in a des…

> Any slightly lengthy text will just bury you in a desert of letters.

So what do you make of books, then?

I don't think people "keep trying to make Gemini happen" in the sense that you mean. They're not aiming to replace the web. They've got a cozy little community that likes the 'smol', text-based web. And while 90% of people might think they're crazy, there are others out there who would like it too if only they knew it existed. Posts like this make the community a few individuals larger. I think that's the goal.

Re: Poor Man's Web

#19

Post by giantrobot »

chwilson wrote: post #16
spiritplumber wrote: post #6

Love Gemini but it really could use inline images.

Up to the client really, I know that Lagrange[1] supports this. [1] https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange

Maybe Gemini could use some lightweight markup language. Shit it could be a form of hypertext. Maybe it could be called something like "hypertext markup language". Then clients could still decide how to render the page but there could be clear links between documents and sites.

Nah, that probably will never work.

Re: Poor Man's Web

#20

Post by chatmasta »

arkh wrote: post #4

Gemini protocol using :// again. I feel like more people should watch Dylan Beattle's "The Web that Never Was" presentation. > gem:my.domain.com/hello

Maybe I'm mis-reading the URI spec [0], but it seems that // is required to separate the scheme from the "authority" part when it's present (as it is for my.domain.com).

[0] https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc3986#section-3.2

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