Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

drewdevault.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

181–190 of 211 posts

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

#181

Post by john-aj »

1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #110
john-aj wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate (or share a configuration example) on how you use stunnel or haproxy to connect an old browser to encrypted websites? I usually use squid for that purpose, but I've been looking for alternatives.

stunnel configuration is useful for a limited number of sites, since one has to specify every remote ip address in the configuration file. haproxy configuration doesnt have that limitation; it can do dns lookups, use maps, etc. for example, one can force all http and https to connect to a backend as https with a specific tls version. this is much simpler than eff's "https everywhere", IMHO. the problem with tls is it…

Thanks for elaborating. I'd be grateful for any resources or configuration examples that explain how to do this with haproxy in more detail. I couldn't really find anything, but then again, I'm not experienced with haproxy.

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

#182

Post by dmitriid »

mminer237 wrote: post #164
dmitriid wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> That's all concerning the content though

Ah yes. Just the content. Including things like WebUSB, WebHID, and a bunch of others.

> 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.

Yes, you probably could. And it wouldn't work with most of the web.

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

#183

Post by Y_Y »

e3bc54b2 wrote: post #115
Y_Y wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On a related note, it seems strange that I can't access sr.ht content over gemini. I know that it's not quite trivial to render something suitable if you're starting with DHTML (lol) but it seems like srcmpwn would be the kind of person to bother doing it.

His posted sometime in his blog that this is on agenda. Can't say when though.

He mentions it at the end of this entry: https://drewdevault.com/2021/09/11/visurf-announcement.html

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

#185

Post by 1vuio0pswjnm7 »

john-aj wrote: post #181
1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

stunnel configuration is useful for a limited number of sites, since one has to specify every remote ip address in the configuration file. haproxy configuration doesnt have that limitation; it can do dns lookups, use maps, etc. for example, one can force all http and https to connect to a backend as https with a specific tls version. this is much simpler than eff's "https everywhere", IMHO. the problem with tls is it…

Thanks for elaborating. I'd be grateful for any resources or configuration examples that explain how to do this with haproxy in more detail. I couldn't really find anything, but then again, I'm not experienced with haproxy.

The example configurations I have seen around the web are not representative of what one can actually do with haproxy. Everything I know is from reading the source code and documentation.

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

#186

Post by Semiapies »

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…

Ignoring that you're ignoring the "almost" in that sentence...What's the "objective good" in the retro-internet obsession? I was there, I enjoyed it, too, but there was no objective good to the gatekeeping, there was just a very small, blinkered culture that thought it would be able to enforce its standards on everyone who ever showed up.

If anything, the objective good is that rather than a toy for people mostly at universities, we now have an internet that's a communications medium for most of the people on the planet.

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

#187

Post by Semiapies »

soapdog wrote: post #123
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…

Gemini is not about the pages without JS and stuff. Gemini for me and many other people is about having a specification that is simple enough that normal people can implement clients and servers from scratch and have fun doing it. You can keep the whole spec in your head. You can develop both clients and servers from scratch just by leveraging some network and TLS libraries. It is friendly to retrocomputers that are…

If all people want to do is play with clients and servers, why all the noise about text and how awful the Web is?

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

#188

Post by Semiapies »

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…

Beyond that these complaints are exaggerated for most people using most common browsers, what on Earth is "inclusive" about Gemini?

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

#189

Post by Semiapies »

mattlondon wrote: post #119
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…

Non-american, non-white, and non-males were using the internet back in the early 90s too! Can't vouch for prior to that but there was at least one :) I think of it as more of a "childhood memories" type thing rather than a bias thing - just like for a child everything they see is novel and new and interesting to them because they've not encountered it before. The internet was the same for a lot of us in the early day…

I can vouch that nobody sees the word "almost".

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

#190

Post by Semiapies »

krapp wrote: post #124
mattlondon wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non-american, non-white, and non-males were using the internet back in the early 90s too! Can't vouch for prior to that but there was at least one :) I think of it as more of a "childhood memories" type thing rather than a bias thing - just like for a child everything they see is novel and new and interesting to them because they've not encountered it before. The internet was the same for a lot of us in the early day…

Except the web of the 90s had quirky stylesheets and images and pages longer than a couple of paragraphs. Almost everything people miss about the old web is Considered Harmful on Gemini.

People in this context are talking early 90s, not mid-late 90s.
Post reply on HN