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

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

#161

Post by ziml77 »

I just browsed around a bit and was left annoyed by the lack of styling. I clicked on a link that I knew was supposed to bring me to another Gemini site and yet I couldn't tell that's what happened. Until I compared the domains, I thought I may have still been on the same Gemini site.

On the web, even sites that use templates tend to have customizations that make them distinct (even if it's just a logo change in the header). As long as no one is intentionally trying to trick me, I can tell without thinking about it when I've clicked a link that's brought me to a new website.

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

#162

Post by NoGravitas »

cyounkins wrote: post #47
RodgerTheGreat wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Writing an http client, on the other hand, is rather complex.

It's really not - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32341518/how-to-make-an-...

It's not complicated, if you only care about implementing HTTP/1.0 and selected easy/high-value parts of HTTP/1.1. If you want to comprehensively implement an HTTP/1.1 client, it's much harder. Doubly so for HTTP/2.

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

#163

Post by tenebrisalietum »

soapdog wrote: post #150
GuB-42 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But still, there is TLS. Gemini is a bit conflicted here. It has both privacy and simplicity as design goals. But privacy (materialized by encryption) is far from simple, so much that "rolling your own crypto" is seen as a cardinal sin, and for good reason. Crypto is an arm race, constantly under attack, constantly updated, and very easy to get wrong. The argument on the Gemini website is to use a library, which is i…

I agree, and to be honest I'd rather the TLS was optional because this would open Gemini to a lot of retro computers. Anyway, there is Mercury which is a simplified Gemini without encryption IIRC which solves that. The important part is that you can treat the TLS as a black box and still hold the Gemini spec in your head. It is easy to implement by simply leveraging a TLS and a network lib. To implement a modern Web…

If you want Gemini without TLS there is Gopher. LaGrange supports both Gemini and Gopher - and I believe there's at least one server out there that does serve both as well though I can't remember the name of it.

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

#164

Post by mminer237 »

dmitriid wrote: post #151
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 specifica…

That's all concerning the content though. If you don't want HTML and Javascript and video streaming and EPUBs on the web, you don't have to use them. None of that concerns HTTP itself, which is developed by IETF.

You could fairly easily make your own web browser that uses HTTP and only reads (gem)text files and ignore the rest of the web.

Or just use Lynx.

Pushing your own standard seems to only add to the complexity of it all. Now if you want to make browser that can read all the text pages, you have implement HTTPS and Gemini.

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

#165

Post by tenebrisalietum »

Semiapies wrote: post #107

This all seemed interesting at first, but the more I look at Gemini, the more I shrug and say, "Why not just build some text web sites without ads or trackers?" Literally millions of those exist, some dating back to the first eta of the web that every geek my age or older seems nostalgic for. (Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being…

> Why not just build some text web sites without ads or trackers?

If I am visiting a site I've never visited before, I have no guarantee what it will do or try to do until I load it/use it. Yes there are ways to control what sites do but the ways to block or manage them always seem to be changing and require keeping up on plugins, whitelists, extensions, which browser is better this week, which NewFeatureKit or TurningWebBrowserInToOSKit needs to be disabled or settings adjusted this time, etc. It's tiring.

We can have an inclusive Internet without this bullshit.

With Gemini, there's pretty much never going to be ads or trackers, because it's as physically impossible as it can be from a protocol standpoint. I can also tell people "install this Gemini browser and you're good" instead of having to explain how modern Internet properties seek to pervasively surveil everything and what needs to be done to prevent it.

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

#166

Post by [deleted] »

Guthur wrote: post #147
abrazame wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Really, they're nostalgic for an era when almost everybody else they ran into on the internet shared the background of being a white, male American geek As someone who doesn’t fit into that pigeon hole, and whose friends mostly don’t either, it’s so disheartening to read essentialist assumptions like these. We liked the Internet better back then too! You’re taking something that’s objectively good, and saying it’s…

Is there something similar to Godwin's law for when white male comes up on internet discourse? If there isn't there should be :)

[deleted]

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

#167

Post by NoGravitas »

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #81
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.

Gemini's text specification is kind of a subset of Markdown -- it supports three levels of headings, block quotes, bulleted (but not numbered) lists, preformatted text, and links (but not inline links). While I'm a fan of richer text styling -- I'm often the dingus on HN being downvoted for suggesting that web fonts are not an intrinsically bad thing -- I think Gemini is mostly just fine the way it is. The thing that…

In the very first days of Gemini's design, I was arguing with other implementers for using a large subset of CommonMark (no raw HTML, no inline images, but pretty much everything else) as the preferred content-type to serve over Gemini. In the end, the goal of ease of implementation for client authors won out. The main arguments were that while there are Markdown parsers for many languages, most of them are narrowly aimed at converting to HTML; Markdown has known ambiguities; the line-oriented markup we ended up with was a strict improvement over Gophermaps while remaining equally simple to parse.

I also miss inline emphasis and other kinds of text-oriented typography, but the reasons gemtext omits them are fairly good.

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

#168

Post by richardfey »

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…

Please share the code! That project should be in the Internet Archive!

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

#170

Post by stavros »

teddyh wrote: post #148
jefftk wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.onion addresses are hashes, but a hash long enough to prevent a brute forcing is also too long for people to consistently recognize. Is facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjghye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onion the right URL for Facebook or a clever near-collision?

(The correct address is facebookwkhpilnemxj7asaniu7vnjjbiltxjqhye3mhbshg7kx5tfyd.onion)

("q" instead of "g").
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