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

drewdevault.com

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

#151

Post by dmitriid »

cortesoft wrote: post #8

I don't quite get this... it sounds like the author mostly has issues with the HTML part of the web, but much of this seems to focus on the HTTP part.... why not keep http and just make a replacement for HTML? Writing an http server is very simple, too

> it sounds like the author mostly has issues with the HTML part of the web

Nope. And he has links to his blogs about what he doesn't like.

--- start quote ---

I used wget to download all 1,217 of the W3C specifications which have been published at the time of writing, of which web browsers need to implement a substantial subset in order to provide a modern web experience. I ran a word count on all of these specifications. How complex would you guess the web is?

The total word count of the W3C specification catalogue is 114 million words at the time of writing. If you added the combined word counts of the C11, C++17, UEFI, USB 3.2, and POSIX specifications, all 8,754 published RFCs, and the combined word counts of everything on Wikipedia’s list of longest novels, you would be 12 million words short of the W3C specifications.

I conclude that it is impossible to build a new web browser. The complexity of the web is obscene. The creation of a new web browser would be comparable in effort to the Apollo program or the Manhattan project.

It is impossible to:

- Implement the web correctly

- Implement the web securely

- Implement the web at all

Starting a bespoke browser engine with the intention of competing with Google or Mozilla is a fool’s errand.

--- end quote ---

https://drewdevault.com/2020/03/18/Reckless-limitless-scope....

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

#152

Post by Shared404 »

warpspin wrote: post #142
skissane wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How did you do networking from QBasic? (And especially when running under NTVDM?)

Can't speak for the original author but if I had to guess: Files on a world writable shared network volume, as this was a "classic" in school settings ;-) No matter the decade, allow some pupils a shared network volume somewhere, they'll soon or later write a chat app with whatever programming language they can get their fingers on in that network, at least that was my experience. I did it, heard from other schools w…

Can confirm that it was still happening as late as 2019.

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

#153

Post by sergeykish »

tdeck wrote: post #38

When I was in high school, I was part of an online community that wrote graphical shells for DOS (really NTVDM) in QBasic. One of the things we all started to want was a web browser, but most of us had no idea how to write a parser, let alone deal with the complexities of HTML and JavaScript. So we created our own markup language, where each "tag" was on it's own line, with the first character indicating the type of…

That's pretty close to GML (precursor to SGML)

    :h1.Chapter 1:  Introduction
    :p.GML supported hierarchical containers, such as
    :ol.
    :li.Ordered lists (like this one),
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Generalized_Markup_Languag...

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

#154

Post by gorjusborg »

MartijnBraam wrote: post #5

I'm a bit annoyed with the lack of _some_ inline image support. but making a browser for gemini is really really easy at least.

I can appreciate your desire for images, but I like the lack of images!

I like the idea of text-only, for the same reason I like retro games: you can't hide your lack of real content with flashy presentation.

I think if people look at tech like this as the 'next web' they won't get it, but I think of it as something completely different: using gemini is more akin to reading a book to the current web being more like watching television.

I can like television while also reading books. And to beat the metaphor to death, most of my favorite books do not have pictures.

I would love to see a world where a vast trove of writing was available in a constrained environment like this.

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

#155

Post by gorjusborg »

Daegalus wrote: post #64

Gemini is great, but I'm would love one step up from this. html/css support, no JS. or Markdown with CSS styling or something that's just a little more than plain text but still close. I've been meaning to try and make my own browser that only supports html/css or Markdown and maybe its own protocol like Gemini's I'll add it to my ever growing Todo list.

That would be pretty cool, but I do think that having CSS would be worse for what I like about gemini.

To me, the point is that you don't need style if the idea and writing is great.

It would be lovely if something like gemini caught on. I'd love to discover a treasure trove of great writing and ideas (again). That's how I felt in the early days of the internet, and it was amazing.

To me, the current web feels like walking down the street while being verbally accosted by a gauntlet of strip mall sign spinners.

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

#156

Post by foxfluff »

Santosh83 wrote: post #111
AstralStorm wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Nobody is going to force you to use JavaScript. But they sure try. Latest iteration of coercion is called Google AMP. Images, videos and other embeds are fine, because they're clear siloes; it's easy to make sure the website degrades gracefully. JS is not, and fonts are not. These do not degrade gracefully. Neither do complex styles in CSS. Canvas does not degrade either. Gemini is a bit too simple to be really use…

Are you sure fonts don't degrade gracefully? The font stack can always fallback to serif/sans-serif right? Icon fonts are a different beast though.

I disable web fonts. That makes many sites very difficult to use. Yes, icon fonts are a part of that, but also the change in metrics messes up some layouts rather bad.

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

#157

Post by blacktriangle »

jokoon wrote: post #114

Seems to use some sort of markdown To be honest I really wish a markdown-like syntax would replace HTML. But I would rather see HTML remove old features and have a stricter syntax.

Markdown-like maybe, but certainly not markdown. Markdown itself has tons of rabbit holes and is deceptively complex, and that's before you get into the issue where you can just insert HTML as HTML.

I really wish more people would give AsciiDoc a shot, it's basically a stricly better Markdown with awesome tooling, sadly it lacks the general in-app support that Markdown has accumulated.

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

#159

Post by qwerty456127 »

tdeck wrote: post #38

When I was in high school, I was part of an online community that wrote graphical shells for DOS (really NTVDM) in QBasic. One of the things we all started to want was a web browser, but most of us had no idea how to write a parser, let alone deal with the complexities of HTML and JavaScript. So we created our own markup language, where each "tag" was on it's own line, with the first character indicating the type of…

> most of us had no idea how to write a parser, let alone deal with the complexities of HTML and JavaScript.

Nice. But couldn't you just use pure well-formed XHTML and make similarly simple pages? Isn't there an XML library for DOS?

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

#160

Post by marcosdumay »

vagrantJin wrote: post #91
II2II wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many years ago, I was put into a situation where I had to start using online banking. Being skeptical about security, I asked for something along the lines of a certificate hash that could be verified in person. They couldn't answer that. So I tried asking how I could verify that the certificate displayed by the web browser was correct. They couldn't answer that. In the end, I ended up trusting the padlock icon and b…

> mostly about the illusion of security. To this day I'm left with the impression that some sort of MITM attack would be possible through the creative abuse of certificate issuers and proxies since there is no direct means of verifying the certificate is authentic Why would a bank's customer support agent know about encryption? Usually IT is a siloed function in most banks.

In a sane world, the bank would have a flier for the teller to give to the GP with several ways to verify the bank's key.

We only live without this because the bank can just reverse transactions when there is a problem and the police will fall pretty heavily on anybody that exploits the weakness. And also, because there are plenty of easier to exploit ones.

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