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Comment by ertian | Hacker News Reader

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 project, not something that requires end-to-end 3rd-party-verified proxiable SSL security.

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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.

I meant to wrote "That's why both are solutions to the problems the Gemini project is trying to solve." m(

Why not? Why is it necessary to use existing approaches, even if they add a lot of incidental complexity? What does it hurt you that Gemini has their own custom markup language that's different than Markdown? You can set up your own little Markdown HTTP server, they're not stopping you.

Markdown has loads of bad design decisions for writing a parser... or being the (human) parser.

I've made an attempt to do better, it may be illuminating: https://github.com/civboot/cxt

> 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.

To me Gemini looks like it was made by people that fetishized the idea of Gopher after reading about without ever have actually used it.

Gopher was not about reading documents, it was a way to map to resources. Those resources might be files or other servers. It was an improvement over FTP since gophermaps (menus) could be customized and link to servers rather than just files.

You could abuse information messages in a gophermap to make a readable document but it wasn't part of the RFC. You also had to make some terminal width assumptions because there wasn't a good way to control text reflow.

Gopher was interesting up until you used the web.

Whatever it "looks like" to you, the fact is that Gemini was made by people who had been using Gopher extensively.

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