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

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

#171

Post by betwixthewires » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 3:23 PM UTC

knowledge-clay wrote: post #49

betwixthewires wrote: post #4

I've been a reader of this gemlog and a fan of Gemini, I have been looking at minimal featured Gemini servers (everyone seems to be building one) and looking for one specifically that offers an http mirror, text and maybe inline images only. Particularly I'd like to do everything in markdown, does anyone know of a good one?

Kineto might be what you're looking for: https://sr.ht/~sircmpwn/kineto/ Inline images is a violation of the Gemini spec: > clients MUST NOT automatically make any network connections as part of displaying links whose scheme corresponds to a network protocol (e.g. links beginning with gemini://, gopher://, https:// , ftp:// , etc.).

I'm aware, I meant inline images in an HTML mirror.

Looks like this might not be exactly what I'm looking for though. It's an HTTP to Gemini proxy, I'm looking for a Gemini to HTTP proxy, I want Gemini to be a first class citizen. The only reason I want to be able to deliver over HTTP is in the event someone doesn't want to mess with Gemini, but Gemini will come first for me.

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

#172

Post by Andrex » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 3:31 PM UTC

selfhoster11 wrote: post #121

tadfisher wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Drew himself threatened to block a Gemini agent that fetched /favicon.png on every page load. I tend to agree with the idea that Gemini should not be extended, as there's always HTTP+HTML for that.

I kind of agree with him, despite being of the opinion that optional inline images should be allowed by the spec. Fetching favicons is going a bit too far for my tastes.

I definitely see situations where Gemini wants to be as bandwidth-friendly as possible, and certain clients auto-downloading resources from the same server would make it difficult to estimate costs/resources/etc.

However for external images available over http/s, I think that should be up to the client.

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

#173

Post by nervuri » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 3:34 PM UTC

dang wrote: post #11

Here are the major past threads. Others? Gemini's "uselessness" is its killer feature - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27490769 - June 2021 (193 comments) Gemini Space - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26670464 - April 2021 (27 comments) Agate, a simple Gemini server written in Rust - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26401158 - March 2021 (34 comments) Beyond the Web: Gopher, Gemini, and the Rise of th…

Bombadillo: a non-web browser - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25223184 - Nov 2020 (50 comments)

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

#174

Post by tdeck » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 4:10 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #136

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…

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

Wow this got a lot of interest.

For that we cheated - someone wrote a xommand-line Windows program called GetWeb (I think) that took in a URL, fetched it, and wrote the result to a particular filename. I believe most of the clients used that, but some (especially those written in FreeBASIC) may have done their own thing.

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

#175

Post by tdeck » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

qwerty456127 wrote: post #159

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?

Since none of us knew how to write a parser, dealing with the arbitrarily nested nature of XHTML was pretty intimidating (now that I know how to do it it's not too bad, but in 9th grade I made very little progress). To my knowledge there is no XML parsing library for QBasic; it fell out of favor for "serious work" about 10 years before XML was invented.

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

#176

Post by tdeck » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 4:15 PM UTC

richardfey wrote: post #168

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!

It looks like at least one example page is online: http://brandoncornell.com/index.qml

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

#177

Post by tdeck » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 4:21 PM UTC

skissane wrote: post #146

mysterydip wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Using serial or parallel ports, or communicating over modem was done in QBasic. It's possible they did something like that.

NTVDM has an interface called VDD you can use to write virtual device drivers. Basically a Windows DLL loaded into NTVDM.EXE and you can call the DLL from DOS by executing illegal instructions. Often a VDD would have an associated TSR which would provide a more normal interface to DOS programs (based on software interrupts not illegal instructions.) Microsoft provides some, and third party vendors and open source pro…

That would indeed have been pretty cool and I remember reading up on ideas like that. What we actually did (as I mentioned in a recent reply) was use a helper program written by someone who knew a language other than QBasic that fetched files given a URL on the command line. I don't think there was a client that ran in actual DOS.

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

#178

Post by tdeck » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 4:25 PM UTC

tester34 wrote: post #122

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…

>but most of us had no idea how to write a parser, let alone deal with the complexities of HTML and JavaScript. >a search engine how did that search engine work?

Pretty much all the apps were written in PHP on shared hosting. Since the system had support for a simple kind of forms (using GET requests), it was possible to accept queries for the various web apps. The search engine crawled the pages that existed looking for links from a few "start" pages, and built a primitive index.

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

#179

Post by Karrot_Kream » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 4:54 PM UTC

abrazame wrote: post #127

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…

> 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…

Well as someone who doesn't fit into that pigeon hole either, but spent a bunch of time on Gemini in the beginning of Gemini (and I might have written something you use on Gemini lol), I disagree with you. A lot of Gemini really is just culture in-group signaling. There's nothing "essentially white, male, American geek" in there but it does harken back to the cultural trappings of the early internet which was largely white, male, and American.

Moreover I don't see what's "objectively good" here, is it the gatekeeping of Gemini or is it the fact that Gemini is mostly just people writing about Gemini and digital minimalism?

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

#180

Post by Karrot_Kream » Tue, Sep 21, 2021, 5:00 PM UTC

tenebrisalietum wrote: post #165

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 Turni…

> We can have an inclusive Internet without this bullshit.

We can but it won't be Gemini. Gemini has fought _tooth and nail_ against accessibility and accessibility metadata. And Geminauts still mostly produce GMI files even though Gemini says nothing about distributing only GMI files. The early Gemini days had optimism about using screen readers to view pages, but that went nowhere. The mailing list has consistently chosen a desire for ascetic, technical minimalism over accessibility. If those are the preferences, then it sounds a lot less like "inclusive Internet without this bullshit" and more like "our cool club where only the plain text kids hang out".