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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

#71

Post by saghm »

ilyt wrote: post #51
stonogo wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

To be fair, I think it's pretty reasonable to say that walking 50 km isn't competition to taking a bus, but just an alternative. To be competition, it would have to be a _good_ alternative...

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#72

Post by saghm »

ilyt wrote: post #8
MatthiasPortzel wrote: post #4

> Gemini documents certainly are never visually very attractive As a proponent of the Gemini protocol, I take issue with this line. The Gemtext format is a minimal markup format for text documents. It's a way of semantically indicating "this part is plaintext", "this part is a link", "this part is a header". Unlike HTML/CSS, it does not provide a mechanism for the author to style their documents. Instead, it is up to…

> As a proponent of the Gemini protocol, I take issue with this line. The Gemtext format is a minimal markup format for text documents. It's a way of semantically indicating "this part is plaintext", "this part is a link", "this part is a header". Unlike HTML/CSS, it does not provide a mechanism for the author to style their documents. Instead, it is up to the client to render the text document, however the client ch…

> It is just taking few things from markdown but changing enough that markdown interpreter won't work. What's the point of that?. Different for sake of being different ?

Maybe an attempt to follow the philosophy of "avoid success at all costs", like the Haskell mantra?

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#73

Post by i2cmaster »

halicarnassus wrote: post #68
rhabarba wrote: post #61

Unpopular opinion: Gemini is Gopher done wrong. There is no need for a TLS layer in a protocol that won't let you POST, and there is nothing Gemini can do that Gopher(+) could not, except that it features "some" formatting - and then again, why not just stick with HTML? There's no place for Gemini.

TLS assures that nobody can tamper with the payload during transit. And while there's no POST, you can still post limited amount of data, which the linked article talked about. Gemtext is a hyperlink format, Gopher is plain text. And some formatting takes you a long way. HTML cannot easily be read in TUIs and needs layout engines only billion dollar companies can maintain.

[dead]

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#74

Post by rhabarba »

teruakohatu wrote: post #65
rhabarba wrote: post #61

Unpopular opinion: Gemini is Gopher done wrong. There is no need for a TLS layer in a protocol that won't let you POST, and there is nothing Gemini can do that Gopher(+) could not, except that it features "some" formatting - and then again, why not just stick with HTML? There's no place for Gemini.

Without TLS you cannot be sure the content was not modified after it was sent to you but before you received. It is a reasonable requirement in the 2020s.

I see my mistake. Sorry.

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#75

Post by SoftTalker »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #45
SoftTalker wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird thing is you can write like that in HTML if you want to. Lots of plain text Will render just fine. I don't think any browsers really even require those opening and closing tags.

It will not. You'll lose line breaks.

Yes that's true, I'll amend my comment to say that there's nothing about HTML that prevents you from writing in this austere styling if that's all you want to do. Quickly scanning the gemtext intro, it looks like you have headings (three levels), links (but not inline), lists, blockquotes, and preformatted text. That's it. So with these tags you're there:

    
  

   and 
  
  

  

Granted gemtext markup is slightly more terse, but it would hardly matter in practice.

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#76

Post by carapace »

ilyt wrote: post #38
carapace wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gemini isn't a competitor to HTML, it's an alternative .

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

Hacker News can't even embed an image or put a table, yet here you are?

Anyway...

         _________________
        /                /|
       /                / |
      /      Table     /  |
     /                /   |
    /________________/  /||
    |   __________   | / ||
    |  | | ||     |  | | ||
    |  | | ||     |  | | ||
    |  | |_|/     |  | |_|/
    |  | |        |  | | 
    |__|/         |__|/

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#78

Post by lmm »

Andrex wrote: post #35

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

What if browsers had a default stylesheet that doesn't suck? The fact that twitter bootstrap had to exist at all should embarrass browser vendors. If people could write their html like motherfuckingwebsite and trust the browser to make it look decent, the web would be a much better place.

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#79

Post by jumpyjumps »

teruakohatu wrote: post #65
rhabarba wrote: post #61

Unpopular opinion: Gemini is Gopher done wrong. There is no need for a TLS layer in a protocol that won't let you POST, and there is nothing Gemini can do that Gopher(+) could not, except that it features "some" formatting - and then again, why not just stick with HTML? There's no place for Gemini.

Without TLS you cannot be sure the content was not modified after it was sent to you but before you received. It is a reasonable requirement in the 2020s.

If it's self signed and TOFU you can't be sure there was no proxy in the middle on first use though.

Re: The Gemini protocol seen by this HTTP client person

#80

Post by tolciho »

stepupmakeup wrote: post #77

does anybody actually use Gemini exclusively, or is it just like Gopher where everybody ends up hosting a HTTP proxy anyway?

No, but browsing the web with w3m isn't much different than browsing gemini with amfora. And with xterm*colorMode:false set, of course. The web can be a lot worse than gemini, but that's the modern web for you.

(Yes, I know your http log says that this browser is "User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 8.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E; MS-RTC LM 8)"; it is not. It is rather amusing to see what sites break because of this.)

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