131–140 of 177 posts
Just a meta-comment, but is this blog meant to be stream-of-consciousness? I found the prose very hard to read, and the phrasing to be quite jarring. Possibly too many commas or separate phrases?
I think the idea that Gemini cannot be extended is a bit silly. Clearly it can be, it’s just not inherent in the specification that it will.
Extending text/gemini is more feasible indeed.
Are there any other protocols that have similar aims? I love the idea of a "corner" of the web that is reminiscent of the plain markup/pre-JS days, and occasionally use w3m to get a taste of it.
I really like the idea of having a more bare-bones text-only web, but I can't get onboard with Gemini until it offers the same support for screenreaders as HTML. (For example, an equivalent of span lang=XX tags is missing, so if you quote a foreign-language word(s) in your text, you can't let screenreaders know what language to read it in). The visually impaired should not be second-class citizens in any new internet…
As a screen reader user, automatic language switching is the first thing I disable. A lot of HTML templates just include 'lang="en"', and developers rarely notice that, even if their website is in another language. I find Gemini pretty accessible overall. There are no images, so including alt descriptions isn't even a concern. There's no CSS, so you can't make controls that visually look like check boxes, but are muc…
The provides an alt text tag to preformatted text blocks for this purpose:
> Any text following the leading "```" of a preformat toggle line which toggles preformatted mode on MAY be interpreted by the client as "alt text" pertaining to the preformatted text lines which follow the toggle line. Use of alt text is at the client's discretion, and simple clients may ignore it. Alt text is recommended for ASCII art or similar non-textual content which, for example, cannot be meaningfully understood when rendered through a screen reader or usefully indexed by a search engine.
Really nice project, seems like some keys to open up the internet again would be: - Decoupling of data (articles, videos, ...) from platforms. - Decoupling authorship claims from platforms - Decoupling online identities from platforms. - Decoupling of user networks from platforms. - Distributed archiving, some years ago if you had an article/manifesto or whatever on Napster or any other P2P system it was trivial to f…
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By "niche" here, we mean affecting very few people, I think? Then "accessiblity" in general is not niche, it effects everyone or almost everyone. But "accessibilty" is a broad concept, applying to all sorts of different unrelated needs. Vision impairment, cognitive differences, mobility needs, etc. Some of them effect more people than others. Some of them will be "niche", effecting few people. it is just a fact, righ…
> By "niche" here, we mean affecting very few people, I think? A text only web is pretty niche. Can this project really afford to start slicing off additional portions of its userbase? I agree that multilingual blind users are in the minority, but those users are probably the most likely of anyone to be interested in a text-only web. And even ignoring blind users, it's just... what's the point of any of this if Gemin…
I agree with you that those behind Gemini should take this issue seriously, but maybe something like what I've mentioned is what they have in mind as their answer. Not sure.
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Just to be really clear here - accessibility isnt a "niche". People being able to use software (which presumably is what gemini is about??) is important for everyone, obviously. Imagine saying accessability hardware - like corrective lenses - is niche.
I'm not necessarily a fan of your tone, seems pretty shrill. But at Apple we were well aware that accessibility features like closed captions were often used by people with no disabilities. We would add stuff knowing that all sorts of people would find uses for it. I can easily imagine a language tag would also be useful for filtering out a German-language gemini for instance. This was a double edged sword however. L…
Gemini is a cool piece of simple tech. I had a genuine pleasure reading the spec: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html I've entertained an idea to build a set of tools for contemporary development (version control, code review, CI, etc) which would only speak Gemini. That would be both the UI and the API. Blockers came fast: * no way to upload anything that exceeds 1024 bytes, * escaping is subtly…
That’s just not the kind of use-case the protocol has been designed for. Think “documents”, not “tools”.
If there are better ideas or fundamentals on which to build the root of another space, then what the Gemini is protocol is saying is that -- make your own protocol and name it something different.
I don't think it's risky to lock-in to the Gemini protocol because: It's very minimal, so A) clients should be minimal as well, and B) Gemini documents are human readable without a client. So if Gemini doesn't work out, your *.gmi files will hardly be useless blobs of tags.
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> Just to be really clear here - accessibility isnt a "niche". This is uncharitable. They were specifically talking about multilingual accessibility. You responded to something they didn't write.
I specifically responded to the "niche within a niche" comment, which I interpreted as referring to multi-lingual documentments as a niche within the niche of "accessibility" in general.