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Comment by coffeecat | Hacker News Reader

Can any Gemini proponents explain what its benefits are compared to just adopting a minimalist subset of HTML? The goal of bringing back the early web (hyperlinked text documents without all the other junk) is great, but making it incompatible with existing browsers makes it unlikely to grow beyond a small, walled-off community of enthusiasts. Is that considered a feature rather than a bug?

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Pretty much, yeah. It's better seen as a souped-up Gopher than a Web alternative.

I've been making a concerted effort to learn Gemini while still keeping my head, and while I still think the idea fundamentally is pretty useless, the people involved are generally nice to hand out with.

https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gerikson.com/gemlog/gemini-sux...

If you click an "https://" link, you don't know whether or not it'll work in your minimal browser. If you click on a "gemini://" link, you know it'll work in your Gemini client.

Gemtext is easy to parse since a parser only has to read the first characters of a line to know a line's semantic meaning. Being line-oriented also improves a document's structure, as it's easy to navigate with links getting their own line.

That's the rationale for using a different protocol scheme and markup.

> If you click an "https://" link, you don't know whether or not it'll work in your minimal browser

Interesting point, it would be unfortunate not to be able to distinguish web links from links that commit to using only the subset. It doesn't strike me as insurmountable though. Off the top of my head, file-extensions and/or MIME types might work.

You cannot include this information in every URL. If you want to include information on how to handle a URL, the proper way is to use an appropriate scheme.

You've not made a specific point, so I'm not sure how to respond.

Why wouldn't file-extensions work? HTML uses .html and .htm.

Why wouldn't MIME types work? HTML uses text/html.

Here are some valid URLs:

https://seirdy.one/

https://seirdy.one/favicon.ico (hint: it's not a .ico file)

https://example.com/index.php

What can you infer only from the URL, before you click? File extensions show server side file formats, which reveal information about the backend's file representation; these do not necessarily correspond to the mimetype. .php, .asp, and trailing slashes are all examples of this; a trailing .html only means that the resource is (probably) a static file on the server, but neither gemini not the Web (nor even Gopher) are necessarily against dynamic content.

Furthermore, web servers can send a mimetype header along with an "x-content-type-options: nosniff" header to make compliant user agents disregard the file extension and use whatever mimetype the "mimetype: " header supplies. I personally use this to deliver a PNG favicon when a browser requests "https://seirdy.one/favicon.ico". The file extension tells you nothing if the scheme is HTTP(S).

If you see someone link both a gemini and an https url, you know what the difference is in advance and that can inform which one you click.

The point of a scheme is to supply a guarantee about what standards a URL will conform to without reading the response. This is necessary to inform the behavior of the request itself, and as I've just explained it can also convey information to the user before they choose to make said request.

> If you click an "https://" link, you don't know whether or not it'll work in your minimal browser.

Thats not what they are talking about. They explicitely said using existing browsers, not making your useless html4 only browser.

It answers the question though if you stop and think about it. If a document opens in a program that can render any plethora of whatever, you don't know what is going to happen when you click that link. With Gemini, you do: a document is going to be fetched that has words in it and those words are going to be displayed on your screen.

See 2.5: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi

Not sure how a subset would work in practice. Though I can imagine a javascript gemini client (as perverse as it sounds...) that could be used as a tunnel into the gemini world in cases where you just want to look something up quickly and/or don't have or want to install a proper client

> Not sure how a subset would work in practice.

What I'm imagining is a specification, defining which subset of HTML should be included, together with a <meta> tag which indicates a document's intention to be compliant with the standard.

I'm imagining some form of YAML or similar frontmatter and markup. A lot of markdown extensions really add a lot of value. Like graphs, admonitions, diagrams, presentations, tabs, mindmaps, etc. I am not particularly fond of XML. I remember liking some of the ideas behind Pug/HAML etc and wished that a browser would just render it natively.

> I'm imagining some form of YAML or similar frontmatter and markup

It sounds like you're expressing disagreement with Gemini's chosen feature-set, but the question being discussed here is whether it would make more sense to use a subset of HTML rather than an incompatible format.

The point of using an HTML subset would be to retain compatibility with conventional heavyweight web-browsers. A feature-rich YAML-based scheme would be neither minimalistic, nor natively web-compatible.

Yes, but how would it be enforced? Just slap on that gemini-tag and pretend to be compliant but continue using all the shady techniques of the modern web.

If most users would end up browsing gemini with a regular browser that sort of thing would be commonplace.

No more perverse than the current state of affairs where you have to run JS to retrieve text content, generate hyperlinks, and image URLs.

My question would be similar but different: what do you use Gemini for, day to day? Do you read the news, or a dictionary, or blogs? Or is it mostly the meta discussion of Gemini itself (which would also be fine, I hasten to add)?

Personally I trawl it (there's a couple of search engines) looking for the weird stuff from the early internet that's hard to find these days.

Is 90% of it crap? Sure, but 90% of everything is crap (sturgeon's law), and it feels less corporate than the current internet. Also people seem to be less angry (on average).

I just read what people that publish over the protocol have to say. A lot of it is meta discussion, because of course it is, but a lot of it is just what you would want to read for the sake of reading, a bunch of words that someone wrote just to write them and put them out for random people to find, no likes or shares or viral this and that or influence intended. It really does feel fun in the same way "browsing" felt fun 20 years ago, there's not a lot in the way of sales pitches when you're reading Gemini documents. It really is hard to describe the weight that lifts off of you when you enter an environment where everyone isn't ruthlessly competing for your eyeballs, and the space to explore whatever you want as a writer when you're not pressured to do that is pretty liberating too.

blogs (gemlogs) are fun to read and discover

It would be trivial for existing browsers to adopt Gemini if they wanted to, so that’s a moot point.

Some of the goal is to prevent it from being so easily infected with tracking, malware, and other anti-user mechanisms.

Another goal is to make the presentation be truly a function of the client, and not the server.

> Is that considered a feature rather than a bug?

It's a policy choice.

Using Gemtext and Gemini makes you acutely aware of limitations, so eventually you either stop using it, or start enjoying it, with most of Gemtext readers sharing the experience.

Using a limited subset of HTML is an exercise in self-restraint, with the ability to go full ham on JS and CSS always being there, but you abstaining from sin. With most of browsers hardly sharing your desire for a JS lent.

There is nothing technically precluding browsers from supporting Gemini and Gemtext eventually. However, the idea is that contemporary browsers are not really interested in supporting it. Having a separate client instantly carves you out an entire world to live in and gives you 100% mindshare in that world. Shoehorning your document format into what browsers support right now gives you 0.001% of the browser world and its mindshare.

> benefits

A small community can have fun with it. Nothing else.

So this question gets asked any time Gemini comes up. Usually there are a lot of answers, some along the same vein, some about personal preference, some that don't seem to sell the concept much and maybe some that do.

A core part of the idea is that with Gemini you know what you're getting when you open a link. If I wrote a blog with a very very minimal rendering (which are nice) and I put the link up, you wouldn't know it from blogspam until you clicked it. With HTTP a link can deliver anything. It is reassuring to know you're getting a document to read and nothing more.

The restrictions on what you can do are a feature. I want to know that when I'm in the mood to just read that I am not going to have a video autoplay and get asked to sign up for a newsletter and have to accept cookies and have infinite scrolling recommendations and a nested menu unique to your site. And when what I'm about to click starts with https:// I have no guarantees.

It gets a little walled off feeling, and that's OK. If only a handful of people care about this thing, then it works. If it becomes widely used, that's cool too. It isn't intended to take over the world, it is intended as a tool, to be used by people who have a use for it.

It's mostly just a social club oriented around a protocol and a format. Initially there was talk about distributing alternative formats (like HTML), and the possibilities of screen readers, but these days it's mostly Gemtext and some syndication/feed formats (e.g. RSS/Atom). In theory you can render Gemtext however you like; in practice the community favors ASCII/figlet art content and spartan text, and doesn't care (positively or negatively) about other ways to view content. The community is mostly technical folks with socialist or anarcho-socialist views. The content is what you'd expect from a webring of blog posters with those views/preferences.

It's a pretty specific community, but if you like that stuff you'll probably fit right in.

I think that's the point. With broad accessibility comes catering to the lowest common denominator - ask anyone who was online a couple decades ago about the eternal September.

One no-brainer thing that I wish Gemini would add is proper footnote support. The reading experience is kind of a pain in the ass if you can't quickly get back to where the note was introduced.

It's not even "early web"; even that had forms and styles. Gemini is intentionally more simple; it does not have forms, it has virtually no input, it has intentionally no styles so all pages look more or less the same.

The early web was all "hypermedia" and people already stuffed images and videos and java applets. Geocities was all animated gifs. Gemini is more like gopher, if it was designed in 21 century.

Gemini does not even have forms, or cookies, or logins, or even any way to input larger text, or write. Intentionally.

Of course people try to hack around that and use the query argument for input. But in general, Gemini is almost actively fighting that.

While not always the intention of the creators, I see esoteric projects like this as a good way to gather like-minded people to work on interesting things.

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