People keep trying to make Gemini happen.
I will keep repeating that in its quest for simplicity Gemini threw the baby out of with the water.
Basic styling and inline images are invaluable.
I will keep repeating that in its quest for simplicity Gemini threw the baby out of with the water.
Basic styling and inline images are invaluable.
Gopher never really went away. A few enthusiasts were keeping it alive. Those enthusiasts realized that Gopher had a number of shortcomings, so Gemini was created to address those shortcomings. It was not created to address the shortcomings of the web. (At least not directly. Indirectly one could argue those enthusiasts kept Gopher alive due to the shortcomings of the web.)
As for styling and inline images: in a sense, Gemini offers styles to a limited degree. Those styles are tied to the structure of the document, while the appearance is left to the software rendering the document. Even though inline images are considered a faux pas, I seem to recall Lagrange offering that feature. Again, we are dealing with the rendering software making the decision rather than the author. Since the end user chooses and configures the rendering software, it is the end user who has control (rather than the author).
From my view in Gopherspace, Gemini is a better fit for the Gopher+TLS thing people keep trying to do which is both incompatible and doesn't square with Gopher being an ultra-light protocol, and thus most appealing to those people who thought Gopher would be the "new smol web" but found it's more its own thing. In particular, Gopher's signature strong menu-document hierarchy that a lot of us Gopher nerds like doesn't have any true parallel in Gemini.
I started gopher.floodgap.com back when it was gopher.ptloma.edu in the late 1990s largely as a historical preservation because I remembered all the cool stuff you could get there. Back then the Web hadn't metastasized to the Tetsuo blob it is today, so that obviously wouldn't have been the reason. I can't speak for the later adopters, but Gemini doesn't scratch my Gopher itches fully (see also https://oldvcr.blogspot.com/2020/11/a-gopher-view-of-gemini.... , my notes on this from 2020).
And thank you for gopher.floodgap.com. While I had some exposure to Gopher in the mid-1990's, most of my exposure was through Floodgap (and SDF) in the early 2000's.
I've taken to writing my markdown and other documetns simiarly. Cory Doctorow does something similar.
https://pluralistic.net/2023/12/20/em-oh-you-ess-ee/#sexytim...
We don't need Gemini. We can get the feeling of the Smol Web by just choosing an effective subset of the features of HTML.
I don't think that's working at all. Their website is so unapproachable bad, that it fails in selling me reasons why I should even care about this or read further. Letting something standing on its own only really works well if you have a small amount to deliver. Any slightly lengthy text will just bury you in a desert of letters.
Is this a bad thing?
Books are a "desert of letters", with little to break the text up outside of chapters, sections, and paragraphs. If you broaden the scope a bit, you can added illustrations and photos. People have been reading books for generations. While many books do break that mould, many books continue to follow that tradition.
You're forgetting pages. The fact pages physically limit the visual bounds of all the letters helps people read them. The words from page 6 aren't going to come into view while you're reading page 4 but scrolled down a little too far.
Depends on the purpose. For a Webpage, which is a collection of short texts, to sell you on something, it is bad.
> Books are a "desert of letters"
Depends on the book. A phone book would be a desert of letters, I don't think many would enjoy reading them. Something like a novel, would be a forest of chapters, full of trees with letters arranged in a meaningful way, leading you on a road toward a goal. But a webpage is not a novel, it has an informative purpose, and is full of little small texts of equal value.
Even the most boring books often have things that Gemini purposefully omits: from styling to inline illustrations to diagrams to insets, asides, footnotes, tables of content, just tables, typographic marks etc. etc. etc.
So what do you make of books, then?
I don't think people "keep trying to make Gemini happen" in the sense that you mean. They're not aiming to replace the web. They've got a cozy little community that likes the 'smol', text-based web. And while 90% of people might think they're crazy, there are others out there who would like it too if only they knew it existed. Posts like this make the community a few individuals larger. I think that's the goal.
This webpage is not a book. It has a different purpose. With a book, I know what it contains, where it's leading to, usually they have an abstract for this.
I have nothing against Gemini and the people in general, I'm just saying the limitation is not working well for every type of text. Pictures and a bit more structure would be useful for the boring informative texts.
Depends on the definition of Webpage and book.
> There are webpages that have interactive 3D models (which physical books can't).
Pop-up-Books?
Have you ... seen books? You can't compare a medium as varied as books to a purposefully limited and primitive medium of Gemini.
I feel that if there were some way of promoting a Javascript-free web, everything the world needs is already there in all modern browsers.
I suspect that between HTML5, and indeed XHTML, and CSS and all the many modern image formats and so on, everything important that almost any site needs could be done using these tools and no JS at all.
And the result could also be interpreted and rendered successfully by much smaller simpler browsers, along the lines of Netsurf and Dillo, which are 10% of the size of a full dynamic-content browser or less.
The question is how.
A contest? Make the richest website you can that uses no Javascript, Typescript or anything else, and win a prize as well as promotion?
What I want is less use of Javascript and related scripting languages across the web. I'd like more websites that don't need it.
I am merely proposing a mechanism for getting people to explore what can be done without it, and how it might in fact be easier, more fun, and more maintainable.
I am not trying to create a reason to make script-free websites. I think they are their own justification.
I am trying to propose a method for making them visible and showing webdevs what can be done and why it's worth trying.
Everything Gemini does, you can do it in HTTP. In fact, a subset of HTTP+HTML would be even simpler than Gemini (mostly because of a lack of TLS) and still compatible with all the modern web stack. Simplicity isn't the main goal of Gemini. Exclusiveness is.