Comment by __void | Hacker News Reader

Comment by __void | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

Once again, in my view, the so called "limitations" exposed here (hyphen and "long-ass lines") are just problems of imperfect clients; while I can understand the long rant about lack of inline links and italics and bold, the analysis of how limited a developer is in "expressing his creativity" in my view shows that the author has not understood that gemini is *user/information first*, so these limitations are there to convey information with a low signal-to-noise ratio, any "embellishment" is useless and not recommended on gemini

gemini is designed in these ways to make the content consumable everywhere, separate from its representation

The idea is to be able to read text anywhere, from an arduino to a 64qbit Qwave sunBreaze, where "reading" also includes blind and deaf people (via text to speech), people who do not care about the possible "text justification mania" that the author seems to care a lot about

Finally, I think that gemini together with small companion protocols and file formats (e.g. amb[1], uxntal/subleq) are fully compatible with permacomputing concepts and this, in my naive but very tired view of the current state of the internet, is enough to understand what is good and what is bad.

[1] http://amb.osdn.io/

full disclosure: I really like this protocol and have developed a full unicode client for esp32

Author here.

My partner is blind, I am well aware of the issues of accessibility online.

I strive to use best practices (like semantic markup) in the online content I produce.

I believe a balance can be struck between pleasing presentation for both sighted and blind readers.

> Finally, I think that gemini together with small companion protocols and file formats (e.g. amb[1], uxntal/subleq) are fully compatible with permacomputing concepts and this, in my naive but very tired view of the current state of the internet, is enough to understand what is good and what is bad.

In practice, where is any of this? Where's the screen reader support? How many blind and deaf people are using Gemini? This is like building a bike lane in a truck parking lot; it makes me doubt anyone will use it and makes me think that it's air cover for the truck parking lot folks to make their parking lot seem more accessible than it actually is.

What is "permacomputing"? It's not listed in any of the goals of the Gemini project. And why do we need amb or uxntal/subleq architectures? Is there a rational chain of thought here that justifies these ideas which doesn't depend on moral philosophy?

(Note that that's my other problem with Gemini. There's a lot of talk of good, evil, producers, consumers, publishers, and all, but the terms are poorly defined and the motivations hand-wavily justified. None of the actual motivational documents regarding the protocol bring these up either, they are just brought up in discussion _around_ Gemini, which is frustrating because it feels like there's a mismatch between the advertised uses of Gemini (and why a user would care) and the concerns of actual Gemini users.)

> gemini is user/information first

It's hard to take that seriously given the limitations of gemtext. A lack of inline links and images, and basic formatting, is the opposite of "user first".

Reply on news.ycombinator.com