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The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

daniel.haxx.se

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Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#51

Post by ilyt »

stonogo wrote: post #48
ilyt wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative would need to fill similar function, while it can't even embed an image or put a table.

That's not what alternative means. A passenger train is an alternative to a bus, but you can't drive a train on a freeway. "Alternative" in no way implies "feature parity". Getting addicted to meth and dying in a shootout with the police is an alternative to completing a medical degree and retiring to the Poconos, but they do not fill similar functions.

I mean if you want to use that as an example it would be like taking a bus or walking 50km to the next town...

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#52

Post by [deleted] »

SoftTalker wrote: post #19
graypegg wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemtext is weird, it’s hyper-focused on a very specific form of text publishing. It’s not trying to be “old internet” featuring the creative freedom of its users, it’s just text content and that’s it. Not even inline links or images! Which I personally think makes it a bad format for the old-internet mainstay of “website about one specific interest of mine”. I run a little capsule but I find myself with not much to d…

Gemtext seems to be more like wanting to be an online typewriter. Back when typewriters were used to write documents, there was one typeface and font, and no hyperlinks or images. To reference other documents you could use footnotes or a bibliography. Margins and line spacing (except maybe for block-quotes) were fixed. A lot of useful information was communicated in this format, but it does seem a bit too austere tod…

[deleted]

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#53

Post by zimpenfish »

ilyt wrote: post #37
zimpenfish wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is that impossible with markdown? No, that bit is the simple bit. > you could probably design every control symbol in markdown as a switch You need a layered mode though - you can have bold, italic, monospaced, header and link all active at the same time - which means you've got 32 states right there. But also! If you do something like `# Header _*bold-italic`, that italic and bold don't apply because the EOL stops…

> You need a layered mode though - you can have bold, italic, monospaced, header and link all active at the same time - which means you've got 32 states right there Requiring like, a byte, for state is hardly a complex requirement. > But also! If you do something like `# Header _ bold-italic`, that italic and bold don't apply because the EOL stops the header state and retroactively cancels those bold-italic attribute…

> Requiring like, a byte, for state is hardly a complex requirement.

Add in table header and table cell to get to 128 states. You can probably get it above 256 quite easily. But the storage requirement isn't the point - it's that you have a complicated state machine where you can't just say "in-bold", "out-bold" as suggested because you also need "in-bold-whilst-italic", "in-bold-whilst-header", "in-bold-whilst-header-italic", etc. with the associated transitions.

Or you have a state machine for each attribute. But then `\n` can affect multiple of them at the same time and also require unwinding your state over a bunch of characters. You can say "this isn't beyond a competent developer", yes, but it is a long way from trivial to get correct.

> you are trying to italicize it twice.

Ah, HN mangled my example markdown. I should have remembered that happens.

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#54

Post by carapace »

sshine wrote: post #26
carapace wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Markdown is, uh, not so good, it just won a popularity cintest. E.g. Creole is much better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creole_(markup)

Why is Creole better? To me they look much the same. Except I prefer Markdown for the looks and how widespread it is. I was a Wikipedia contributor for many years before Markdown came along, and I think Markdown has a better flavor for hyperlinks. "[link text](url)", "[link text][footnote] + [footnote]: url" are just great. I write like this even without any expectation of rendering it as anything but plaintext.

Years ago I read a well-reasoned comparison of a handful of markup languages and the author made a strong case for Creole (which I had never heard of before or since. I use markdown just like everybody else. ;)

Unfortunately, I can't remember the arguments and I've never been able to find that article again.

So I can't tell you why it's better. But try it and see what you think?

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#55

Post by StrangeATractor »

I love the idea of Gemini, but I feel like you could do the same thing, but better, with git and plaintext or markdown, maybe make a specialized client for browsing/rendering these git pages. "Gemini" as a protocol and name is just there for the community to nucleate around.

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#56

Post by snerbles »

Andrex wrote: post #35

What if... Markdown was its own MIME type and browsers rendered it with a default stylesheet? :thinking_emoji:

As long as any actual formal standard contains the term "markdown", John Gruber will find a way to torpedo it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8274870

https://blog.codinghorror.com/responsible-open-source-code-p...

https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo...

https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#57

Post by josefx »

Apreche wrote: post #7
spenczar5 wrote: post #3

The high-level criticism, which is that Gemini's specification is too loose and vague, seems very, very convincing, even if the specifics aren't. In a subtle way, this is a significant hurdle for any competitors to the HTTP world. They have to overcome 30 years of technical debate and refinement as ambiguities have been hammered down.

I agree. I think a lot of the problem can be solved with discipline rather than a new spec entirely. If HTTP offers features that are offensive or unwanted, simply don't use those features. Make an HTTP server and client that only implement a subset of HTTP. Then use a subset of HTML, or another content type entirely. This means anyone still using a popular browser like Chrome can visit your sites, but people using a…

> If HTTP offers features that are offensive or unwanted, simply don't use those features. Make an HTTP server and client that only implement a subset of HTTP.

Just make sure it never ends up in a security critical context. Various larger companies already got screwed over when their front end code did not detect the size of a http message the exact same way their backed code did.

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#58

Post by halicarnassus »

ilyt wrote: post #33
ertian wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you just misunderstand the point. A lot of criticism of Gemini seems to make the assumption that it's intended to replace HTTP and that it's badly thought through for that use. In fact, I think it basically came from a niche group of Gopher hobbyist users who wanted to fix a few longstanding annoyances with Gopher. They wanted something that anybody could write a client or server for as a fun little weekend p…

Right but if you want simple why not "just" use markdown (with maybe HTML support cut off?). Why make something subtly-similar-but-incompatble ? If you want protocol to be light and low on bandwidth, why would you not include at least the simplest of caching semantics ? It is just bad design decision after bad design decision

Markdown is not context-free and therefore hard to parse.

Caching can be abused for tracking.

That's why both are solutions to the problems the Gemini project is trying to solve.

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#59

Post by Kwpolska »

snerbles wrote: post #56
Andrex wrote: post #35

What if... Markdown was its own MIME type and browsers rendered it with a default stylesheet? :thinking_emoji:

As long as any actual formal standard contains the term "markdown", John Gruber will find a way to torpedo it. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8274870 https://blog.codinghorror.com/responsible-open-source-code-p... https://blog.codinghorror.com/standard-markdown-is-now-commo... https://daringfireball.net/projects/markdown/license

Fine, `text/commonmark`, with a `.md` extension since Gruber doesn’t use that?

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#60

Post by halicarnassus »

giantrobot wrote: post #41
ertian wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This means anyone still using a popular browser like Chrome can visit your sites I think this would be seen as more of a drawback than a feature. If you're trying to build a tight-knit little hobbyist community, random people popping in and complaining that "these pages are boring, where are all the images?!" isn't helpful.

Gemini doesn't support POST so no one can possibly pop in to say anything.

Given that there are microblogging (gemini://station.martinrue.com/), reddit with optional git connection to allow for issue tracking (gemini://geminispace.org/), it seems you're wrong.
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