I discovered Gemini in 2023 and really enjoy it. I like the minimalism. I like that page presentation is up to the user. I’ve even come to appreciate the line-based nature of its markup, because theoretically at least, it means a screen reader user knows that elements are always arranged top to bottom.
I say “theoretically” since I have yet to run into an accessible Gemini browser for Windows, which is unfortunate since Gemini’s whole deal is text first.
And to head off the inevitable comment about Linux, in order to have an accessible app you need an accessible OS for it to sit on top of.
The issue is that if you don’t give people imbedded images, they re-invent them with inaccessible ASCII art. If you don’t give them the ability to change fonts, they reinvent it using those awful Unicode hacks. Etc etc etc. From my experience working in the industry, you have to give people a standard way to do all of the things they want to do. Otherwise they’ll invent nine different ways of doing them, and not a single one will be accessible. When I looked via a proxy, like half the pages I encountered in gemspace had ASCII art. An accessible browser would take maybe a day or two. I just can’t think of any reason to bother.
Yes. I had the same thought. If it ever became more widely adopted the preformatted code blocks would be used to plug holes in the markup standard like tables, nested lists, etc. in a way that would not be accessible.
Also, an accessible browser would take a day or two for someone with coding experience and a desire to develop said browser, and there seems to be little overlap on that Venn diagram.
Yes, that’s what I meant. I have the experience to do it. I just see no point because of the issues with the standards.
I use Gemini a bit. I think it’s a cool idea. The main annoyance is that the gemtext format is too minimalist, I would have preferred if it used a form of markdown with support for inline links, bold, italics, etc.
About Gemini:
The good: good idea, gemtext is line-oriented and simpler to parse.
The bad: coming from that weird guy (IMHO, it’s not good for marketing), cannot reuse connections like HTTP, no bold or italics in the text, specifications are weird, feels half-baked like an alpha version.
I think as an alternative to the http/WorldWideWeb, Gemini or similar protocol is a great idea, but the markup should be a bit more extensive so people can really use it in a practical way, e.g. with emphasis (bold, italic) and inline links. Images (possibly audio with a size limit also), which would not need to be allowed inline, but should (optionally) be rendered on the same page with the text between lines where the link is, as some Gemini browsers can do but is not required in the specs.
But the most important things are 1) that it does not allow any kind of javascript or other code execution, and 2) it stays simple enough for anyone to be able to create their pages easily, for programmers to create simple, smallish browsers to render the pages, and keep that low bandwidth, so it could even be used on a mesh network (a browser for a mesh or other very low-bandwidth network could ignore media files).
Unfortunately I don’t know how it could be protected from AI any more than the normal Web can.
regarding low bandwidth, I think part of the problem is the mandatory encryption, both for legal reasons because encryption is dissallowed on amateur bands in many (most?) countries, and because encryption adds overhead.
I have never heard of such stuff. Sounds interesting, any links?
Gopher predates the WWW (at least to market) but ended up losing out to it.
Gemini is a spiritual successor to Gopher born out of dissatisfaction with the state of the modern web. Everything about it is deliberately, almost aggressively minimalist, to a degree that will likely put off many. But it’s meant to be human-scale, the technical details are something a technically inclined person can wrap their head around in its entirety.
They’re a novel idea. I had a gopher hole for a while, and did some exploring of others. Got bored quickly, personally.
