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Comment by Daegalus | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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's kind of a blocker for me is, of all things, no way to emphasize inline text. Changing text from regular to italic/oblique carries semantic meaning. If you could mark it with _underlines_ like Markdown, for instance, it could be just like some of the other Gemini text that's described as "strictly optional for clients to do anything special with".

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.

I come to think of it, this is a client problem (specifically the client used to write the pages): gemini is natively utf8, bold and italic are present in unicode!

In general, on gemini, all "problems" are with the client and not with the protocol ;)

That would be pretty cool, but I do think that having CSS would be worse for what I like about gemini.

To me, the point is that you don't need style if the idea and writing is great.

It would be lovely if something like gemini caught on. I'd love to discover a treasure trove of great writing and ideas (again). That's how I felt in the early days of the internet, and it was amazing.

To me, the current web feels like walking down the street while being verbally accosted by a gauntlet of strip mall sign spinners.

Nothing stopping you from turning off JS in your web browser. ;)

I have, and whitelist the sites that really need it.

If I see an http(s) URL, I have no idea whether I'll have to play whack-a-mole with selective attack-surface expansion (enabling JS, media, SVG, third-party JS, or JIT) for a rich text document to load.

If I see a gemini:// link, I know in advance that a singe download will give me a single readable page, and that it probably won't make my old laptop's fans spin or kill my battery. This significantly improves usability.

I did that for a while, but I want to kind of enforce it. If a sight is unusuable without JS, maybe its worth finding an alternative.

Or maybe form a new sub-internet of just javascript-less web. HTML, server-side rendering, etc.

Definitely a cool idea. I've thought a lot about this idea as I'm sure many others on this post have. A protocol for just HTML/CSS (and a lightweight bridge) could be cool to see. This desire was why I was initially on board with AMP (before I saw the bigger problems with that format.)

I've also thought about a JSON-only protocol. In my mind this would make it simple to do AJAX-type interactions for loading content (the core benefit of JS to me) while still excising JS in its entirety, but I haven't thought it through very far admittedly.

This is the first time I'm hearing about Gemini and I'm really intrigued, especially how it's handling input and identity. There's potential here...

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