How is a network protocol proof against being used to transport CSS files? Does the network stack inspect what you're shipping and ensure you're only sending 100% Pure Plain Text?
> The Gemini transport protocol is unsuitable for the transfer of large files, since it misses many features that protocols such as FTP or HTTP use to recover from network instability.
Isn't that TCP's job? Is this person saying Gemini doesn't use TCP?
Finally:
> Now, what does Gemini currently have to offer? The best way to find out is to head over to the official site: gemini.circumlunar.space in your Gemini browser.
Back in the Gopher days, my "Gemini browser" would be my Web browser. That was one of the reasons Web browsers took off: You could use them to access all of the information on the Internet, including the WWW, Gopher, Usenet, and Email. Only more recently did Mozilla morph from the Netscape Communicator software suite into the slimmed-down Firefox browser without email, spinning off Thunderbird in the process, and only much later did Firefox drop Gopher support from the core binary.
> Isn't that TCP's job? Is this person saying Gemini doesn't use TCP?
maybe he’s talking about higher level features, like the possibility to restart a download from a certain point, without redownloading the initial part? haven’t used this since dialup days, though
I suspect that it is this partial download that they are talking about.
That said, I can't tell whether or not I've used it recently. I know I don't use it when I play with personal projects, but I don't know what other sites do because I rarely have a console pulled up in my browser when I'm just using it, rather than developing.
Its often used with bulk file downloads (e.g. curl a multi-gb file while transfering between wifi networks), as well as video streaming sometimes (buffering)
Download managers that speed up downloads use this feature. I.e. they use 2 threads, 1 download from the beginning and the other continueing from the middle of the file. This fools single connection throttling measures.
> Gemini has no support for caching, compression, or resumption of interrupted downloads. As such, it's not very well suited to distributing large files, for values of "large" which depend upon the speed and reliability of your network connection.
> How is a network protocol proof against being used to transport CSS files? Does the network stack inspect what you're shipping and ensure you're only sending 100% Pure Plain Text?
The Gemini specification includes its own format for pages, which is a text-based scheme inspired by Markdown and Gopher menus. You can use the Gemini protocol to transmit things other than Gemini pages, sort of like how you can use HTTP to transmit PDFs and Word documents, but you wouldn't build your whole site out of them. (At least that's my impression, I haven't gotten around to actually visiting many Gemini sites yet.)
> How is a network protocol proof against being used to transport CSS files? Does the network stack inspect what you're shipping and ensure you're only sending 100% Pure Plain Text?
It's just like the web, the transport protocol (HTTP/S) can be used on any file. But there is a separate spec for the document format (HTML etc.). You could transport CSS over Gemini, just don't expect any of the browsers to render it. Just like how web browsers won't execute alternate scripting languages natively.
> Isn't that TCP's job? Is this person saying Gemini doesn't use TCP?
I didn't really elaborate on this point while writing, because I had nothing to add. I will quote from the projects FAQ:
>> Gemini has no support for caching, compression, or resumption of interrupted downloads. As such, it's not very well suited to distributing large files, for values of "large" which depend upon the speed and reliability of your network connection.
Hopefully that clears up what I meant.
> Back in the Gopher days, my "Gemini browser" would be my Web browser.
You might be interested in Castor[1]. It's a browser for the minimalist internet. Rolls support for Gemini, Gopher and Finger all in one.
I can understand why FF removed support. But hopefully smaller applications, like Castor, can fill this gap.
>>Gemini has no support for caching, compression, or resumption of interrupted downloads. As such, it's not very well suited to distributing large files, for values of "large" which depend upon the speed and reliability of your network connection.
Which honestly is pretty silly, as lots of caching is about reducing latency for small files not saving bandwidth for large files. Suppose it matters less if the documents are self contained.
> You could transport CSS over Gemini, just don't expect any of the browsers to render it.
If Gemini is ever of even domain-specific serious use, I'd expect both the format and protocol to be added to what is supported by existing major web browsers (it can't be both tractable for small implementers and intractable for Apple/Google/Mozilla), which, as it turns out, know how to support the combination of HTML/CSS/JS just fine and won't likely forget just because a different transfer protocol is involved. Presenting a DOM mapping for Gemini format pages and exposing it at least to extensions even if there is no way to include page scripts doesn't seem unlikely, either.
A better approach to Gemini would be to create a UGC web app that allows people to create simple, text-only, markdown-enabled content that does not track users. And I think plenty of those exist already. It would be the circa 2004 era blogging platforms.
And then someone adds some privacy violating javascript to their site, and everybody who linked to them before is now pointing their readers right back into the big bad web.
The creator of Gemini has a post about this, linked above.
My understanding of Gemini’s raison d’être is that the JavaScript-laden app-filled WWW is an anti-feature so doing anything with Gemini and web apps would be contradictory.
Well, there's nothing stopping you from serving HTML/CSS/JS web apps over the Gemini protocol.
(Nothing stopping you from building a browser that handles gemini format documents and does special things with JS links, either, though to avoid accidental execution issues you would probably need to extend the format to distinguish “links I want to execute” from other links.)
I'd like to say again that by competing with the modern web to do things that gemini isn't good at, gemini gets to lose those contests, and this should limit the success of efforts to to make dancing bears out of gemini.
That's actually covered in the deeper linked docs on Gemini.
Setting it up on a separate protocol / markup allows you to make hard reasoning about what kind of privacy, features and protection you get as a user, rather than relying on the goodwill or current promises of your content provider.
It’s not meant to “get traction” in the Silicon Valley sense of “everyone must use this or there is DOOM”, it’s meant to be useful for the communities that use it.
If you open the Gemini link posted below about why just defining a new doctype wouldn’t work, give it a read.
>It’s not meant to “get traction” in the Silicon Valley sense of “everyone must use this or there is DOOM”, it’s meant to be useful for the communities that use it.
If you're building a protocol that enforces certain strict standards, like in this case being text only because the internet is 'bloated' according to the author, then the only point of having it is adoption beyond your community.
If all you want to do is communicate with ardent non-bloat advocates you can already do this on the regular internet, because everyone in that community does it voluntarily already
There's no point in codyfing standards for a community that follows your standards to begin with
Attracting people who agree with your community's standards to join your community, while hinting that maybe other people might not be interested, is perfectly reasonable. That's... pretty much how communities work.
yes but you don't need a disinct technical foundation that is incompatible with your surroundings. If you want to go play at the chess club you can simply go there and everyone is interested in chess, you don't need to start a new chess players only micro-nation that keeps all the other people out, in the middle of the forest where bloated cars can't get to. That'd be pretty unecessary. In fact if you want to attract new people, that's a really bad idea
Solderpunk has explained the issues with specifying a safe subset of HTML, the article has been linked elsewhere in this thread. If you don't want to use a Gemini browser to access it, you can use this link: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/users...
This would seem to be a similar sort of issue to when people say "come chat on IRC", or use a mailing list to communicate about a project, or whatever else - you're not going to use those if all you ever want to use is a web browser. And that's ok in my book. I'll hang out with the people who do want to use those tools.
Except, of course, that there are IRC clients accessed through browsers, mail through browsers, Usenet through browsers... so you don't actually exclude people that way.
If Gemini catches on, someone will write an add-on for Firefox that reads it. And then it's just part of the Web that is fast and looks a little different.
And that link is a long-winded way of saying "It's good to put an artificial barrier in the way."
There's actually already portal.mozz.us as well as proxy.vulpes.one, both of which are Gemini "portals" ala gopher.floodgap.com. I actually began to try and write an addon to open gemini:// links in Firefox based on Overbite, but I couldn't figure it out (and I'd have to change the gemini protocol to something like gemini+web, due to Firefox limitations).
Just because you can do that, does not make it part of the Web -- it's still a different space. Those portals are basically web-based clients to the protocol, which means they're still bound by the rules of the protocol -- they're not going to have JS in them, for example.
Hey, I just want to jump in here as a counterexample to your argument -- I came into Gemini from "beyond the community." I was a standard web user; I found out about gemini from another discussion on HN or Masto or somewhere and jumped in, and now I absolutely love the community I joined.
So it's absolutely become adopted beyond its beginning community.
If think what the parent is trying to say is; if this protocol is a subset of of we have today with HTTP and HTML, why not to create more of a political movement cheering for this subset to be use, the same way Google does with AMP?
On the technical side of things, it looks like its an old battle replayed with older weapons, just to get go through the same path of HTML. "Oh, but we will not put more features". Ok, but people wont use it then because they can also serve text, markdown, etc... and can chill out, because they know if later they need to serve images, videos or graphics, they can do it with HTML.
And i say this as a person who is also trying to create some alternatives to the web. But instead of going back to the nineties, i tried to think how the technology of 10 years ahead would look like. I've probably not maded it because its really hard to push the envelop when things are almost in the state of the art as Web is. But i also don't think the answer for the future will be in the past.
You know what i think would be a really badass movement. To create a simple spec of the Web, even without Javascript. Because with "feature creep" Google through Chrome is making impossible for others players to create competing browser engines.
So if two folks decide that they will create a web engine in this new language they like, it wont be an impossible goal. Because there's this simple version of the spec, with much less features.
The people behind this might be very good at convincing people and real believers, this thing can float for some time working real hard for this.. But it will be really hard to get this out of a small niche.
Anyway i love the thinking behind this. The meditation, the koan, is really on the right track. We need more rebels and fighters on this front. But i just can see it, how this can compete as a subset of a massively popular and deployed protocol with clients everywhere? How can it really differentiate itself, apart from what the web today already can serve to people?
The problem is that then you link to https://yourfriendsblog.org, and a couple years down the line your friend decides this safe subset is too restricting for them and decides to replace their blog with Wordpress with all the plugins and Cloudflare captchas and Google Analytics and evercookies and whatever else. The reader is dumped, unceremoniously, back into the big bad web, but could never know this before clicking the link.
When you link to a Gemini URL, you're linking to something you know can't be replaced with something privacy-violating in the future. The worst that can happen is the server shuts down, which is a very different failure mode. And someone is less likely to do that than to switch to a different brand of HTML - or so's the hope.
It's not going to be a major thing that everyone uses. That's ok! Neither is IRC, mailing lists, and whatever else - but people still use them, every day. There's ideas exchanged, friendships made, relationships formed, and they serve a not-insignificant community's needs.
> The reader is dumped, unceremoniously, back into the big bad web, but could never know this before clicking the link.
Ok, but you know the big majority of the users dont care were the content come from, or how its delivered to them. They care about what is being served instead of how.
If you guys manage to have some 'killer apps' on this protocol, where people will try to reach it no matter how its is implemented, than there's a chance.
IRC killer app is IRC itself, and they manage to push themselves as alternative in the nineties where a lot of popular protocols and alternatives like the web were still in the beginning.
Anyway, if you convince people over time to serve their content through this medium, with enough and interesting content, the user will try/learn to reach them.
But i dont know, i think at least they should be trying to use some p2p DNS system, making it easy for people to serve their own content, or revisit BBS and serve contents in tree-like structures akin to directories..
I feel that there must be something to really differentiate it from everything else. Some things that are unique, and that the web + others are not covering. Because if you think about IRC or Email, they have distinct features that web could never cover even being a mammoth protocol, while this doesnt hold the same way when you think of Gemini proposal.
Anyway, people trying to do something, to change things for what they perceive as the better is a good thing, and it should always be celebrated, because even when the thing doesn't stick it might need adjustments, incremental evolution or just to serve as a influence to something else or through experience inspire the creators to create something even better.
> Ok, but you know the big majority of the users dont care were the content come from, or how its delivered to them. They care about what is being served instead of how.
Who, exactly, without a profit motive, wants the majority of users? I don't want to talk to most people, and I don't want most people to read what I have to say. I, like most people I think, want to spend most of my time in my community sharing things I find interesting with people in my community.
It's the same as tilde servers, or MUDs. They're not going to take over the world. They're small communities and most people will never even know they exist, and that's fine.
You can read it with a Gemini browser, along with a lot of other content! There's a list of clients at https://gemini.circumlunar.space/clients.html, along with SSH and HTTP bridges.
True, but before you visit that website, you don't know anything about how the site was implemented, or what JS is going to run, or whethere there will be a big autoplay video advert, etc.
When you visit a gemini URL, you know how it's going to serve you a limited capability, text based document, styled according to your own rules.
I don't think he makes his point very well or convincingly. You could, if you wanted, make a plugin for a browser that blocks non-simple tags, blocks cookies, blocks images, blocks scripts, etc, and I suspect he's wrong to say that '...such an undertaking would be an order of magnitude more work than writing a fully featured Gemini client'.
He goes on to say 'Supposing you had such a browser, what would you do with it? The overwhelming majority of websites would not render correctly on it.' - A very good point, but equally applicable to a Gemini browser.
IMO, they have confused the network protocol with the presentation. You don't need to drop HTTP in order to change the way websites look. Likewise, you don't have to implement HTTP features that you don't like (e.g. cookies). This just strikes me as another mistaken belief that rewriting code from scratch will solve all your problems.
The proposition of Gemini is that it creates a separate, deliberately incompatible, ringfenced part of the internet that is self-sufficient; not operating as a subset of a larger whole but as something sovereign and self-contained. This fosters a community spirit and allows one to remain 'within the fence' in a way that would be very hard to do if inhabiting simply a subset of the existing web.
Author of elpher here. If you were running under MacOS you were probably hitting the restriction that GUI Emacs explicitly forbids the display of coloured Unicode characters on that platform.
This is hard to understand for someone not familiar with Gopher, but I’m interested in how menus are handled.
I’ve always wished browsers handle site menus in their chrome, so that the document can be focused on content not navigation. It’s the browsers job!
For a while Opera supported these related links in the head for some pages but the dev was unable to add their own, it was limited to a small number of standard items such as Index. These were shown in a browser toolbar.
Nonstandard navigation have always been a point of friction for users as it precludes universal access by having to relearn how each site works.
I feel like the lack of image support is a missed opportunity.
I know it is an idealogical choice to only have text, but being able to embed standard image formats (on a totally plain, non fancy way) would increase the utility of this hugely. They mention blogs and tutorials and recipes here - those would benefit hugely from having simple inline images within the body of the text, just like you expect in a newspaper etc.
So did I. But I'm not going to let one drawback distract me from something otherwise very good, nothing is perfect after all.
I can even understand why they did it. To keep the doc format very simple.
I hope that more clients will add unique rendering features that will turn this drawback on it's head. It could be in-line rendering or a gallery-like feature.
Technical paper is what I was thinking about there. Furthermore, since Gemini apparently lacks support for mathematical notation images would be necessary for such even if the paper doesn't intrinsically contain non-textual images (e.g. pictures, charts, or graphs, which are common though not universal).
I understand why they didn't allow inline images, but I agree with you it limits a lot of use cases.
If I were designing it, I would say: "you can have images, but they always display as a 'block element', with nothing to either side. No worries about wrapping text; no background images under other elements, etc." I think that keeps the spirit of simplicity.
you can have images and they don't always display as anything. the author of the user agent decides how they are displayed. you could in-line them if you wanted to, but only a few clients do that at the moment. there are no hints to the client about how some content could, should, or should "always display as".
It's text. The client displays that text and renders links, headings, etc, however it wishes. If it really wants to, it could just not format them at all. There's a gemini client made for plan9's acme text editor that doesn't render links, and instead displays them verbatim, because the plan9 plumber can handle the hyperlinking aspect. All of that is eye candy and fluff.
If a client finds a link to an image, it can in-line it if it wants. If you wrote a client, when it found a link to an image, it would in-line it "with nothing to either side." That's not something that has to be specced.
You could have a setting on the client that lets the user specify that that's how they always want to see images, I on the other hand might specify that I want to open them in a new window, or see a thumbnail until i hover over, etc.
Same with how headers are displayed (maybe i want folding or something), whether an ToC is displayed, colours, fonts, etc.
The point is that the user can decide all this stuff, without having to hack it around the author's own styles and scripts.
I'm not sure how recipes, for example, would be an issue without inline images. You click (or otherwise trigger) the image link and look at the image (potentially in a new tab or window) then go back to reading content. It isnt hard or even a bad experience. It is just different than current expectations based on comparing something that isnt the web to the web.
Being able to look at the image of the preparation step while reading the instructions is nice when making a recipe. Having to go to a separate page is annoying.
I agree, but I see this as a client-concern. I could imagine clients fetching and inlining images if the user directed it to, or maybe media-focused clients having a text pane alongside a media pane where the images would be rendered. The main advantage I see of this approach is that it takes us from "the server decides what the client does" to "the client decides what the client does".
Ok, but the recipe maker is going to want to suggest where to put the images (so they are in the proper spot on the recipe).... at which point, how is that different than html? A client can decide not to render the image where it is suggested already.
A large part of HTML, and a large part of modern browsers and other web technologies, are focused on ensuring that the publisher has control over the user's experience. I really like the fact that Gemini breaks that, and I hope that the project owners mercilessly reject any attempt to introduce features that allow the server to control or influence user experience.
I would really like to see structured text that is self-descriptive (e.g. this is the document title, this is a paragraph, this is a header, bullet list, etc.) but have no ability to influence HOW those things are displayed- eventually maybe we'll have browsers that can support rich theming, etc.
Others have noted that lack of images is an oversight. Perhaps the language needs a "binary file download" structure, and if the binary in question is a media file, then the browser could choose to display it. Maybe signal with mime types?
Would it be too simple to say that you're looking for HTML without CSS ? Because HTML already has semantic tags describing "this is the title" "this is a list" etc...
As a producer you can always circumvent the constraints imposed by a software. You can use a "this-is-a-title" tag to make text appear bigger, you can use a "this-is-a-list" tag to make content linear instead of using paragraphs, etc...
What I'm saying is that there can't be a format that isn't hacked and exploited to allow the publisher to do what they want, because ultimately it's their content so they control it. Maybe limiting the existing tags in HTML is a good idea (AFAIK that's one of the strategies of AMP) but reinventing a structured format will just lead to HTML-but-less.
If you want to give control to user, then you have to do that from the User Agent: forbid any publisher-provided styling, allow only certain tags, are going to actually do what you want, instead of inventing yet another format
You'd want HTML without CSS and without all the ancient legacy HTML 3.2 styling attributes (i.e. no way to set table cell sizes/padding, no way to set colors on anything)
> focused on ensuring that the publisher has control over the user's experience
Worth noting that this is modern browsers/web, and was initially not like this.
The term "user-agent" comes from that the _user_ has control over the experience, no matter what the publisher thinks. The agent (browser) acts for the user, hence user-agent.
User-agent CSS files were rampant back in the days, when a lot of content was unstyled. So you could navigate between websites and they looked the same, as they would use your user agent css files.
But then everyone decided they had to have a unique look on the web (CSS). Then they decided they needed unique functionality on the web (JavaScript). And here we are :)
as an extension of this, user stylesheets are interesting conceptually, but practically, web pages became quickly indistinguishable when the same stylesheet was applied to every page. it hindered memory (mental categorization) and recall.
users then predictably wanted pages to look different, to have style, and that's likely the principal cause of user stylesheets' decline, not corporate coercion. that's not to argue against user stylesheets per se, but that they'll likely never have wide usage.
There are a few gemini clients that support theming (inlcluding fonts, font sizes, text color for various elements, list bullet style, link color based on scheme, and page background color). This one comes to mind: https://github.com/MasterQ32/kristall
I've tried few around and this one seems to be most user-friendly, tho it looks like it has trouble displaying menus with multiple entries (spacebar interpretation)
> A large part of HTML, and a large part of modern browsers and other web technologies, are focused on ensuring that the publisher has control over the user's experience.
It's also the reason why it caught on. On one hand people reject the ability to express individuality on the web, on the other a similar crowd is nostalgic about geocities and praises similar revivals. It's either one or the other.
> I would really like to see structured text that is self-descriptive (e.g. this is the document title, this is a paragraph, this is a header, bullet list, etc.) but have no ability to influence HOW those things are displayed- eventually maybe we'll have browsers that can support rich theming, etc.
How about publishing markdown over HTTPS? Then make a client that renders just that?
as an early gemini convert this is one of the reasons I wish solderpunk would split the gemini protocol and text/gemini mimetype specs. gemini can serve more than text/gemini (e.g. markdown as you suggest), so embedding the text/gemini mimetype into the protocol spec seems rather like embedding the html spec into the http one
I agree in part, and disagree in part. I like that gemini has a "native" markup format, and that its simple and bare-bones as it is. It's a communications baseline, and other things are negotiable between client and browser?
> On one hand people reject the ability to express individuality on the web, on the other a similar crowd is nostalgic about geocities and praises similar revivals.
I like to think about books as of an example where content is way more important than presentation. Most of the web sites these days spend a lot more effort on how you present it than what, in the end a 1000 thousand words article now has a very complex architecture behind it, hundreds or thousands of time more than the content.
Why's it either one or the other? You could have one browser application for no-nonsense textual or informational pages and one for wacky personal geocities/myspace style pages. Feel free to enjoy both, either separately, or if you want more integration you're free to use the underlying OS shell to switch between them, read them side-by-side, link between them, etc.
> You could have one browser application for no-nonsense textual or informational pages and one for wacky personal geocities/myspace style pages.
Hence the idea of a separate markdown only browser. I don’t think http is the problem here. So it would be better to reuse as much existing tech as possible.
Note: Personally I don’t think it would catch on, the convenience of handling everything in one program is just too high.
This is the only part that I don't really understand about Gemini. Even the most basic printed publications can include illustrations. <img> got added to HTML very early on because sometimes it's hard to share some piece of information in anything but a visual form.
I write a (mostly) technical blog that certainly focuses more on text content than images. I would be happy to throw away the header, sidebar and the rest of the "design" cruft (in fact my blog is perfectly usable in a browser that doesn't support CSS or Javascript) But I can't imagine having my posts without graphs, diagrams and photos inserted in the text.
If the fear is that in-line images would lead to frivolous use as ads or "useless multi-megabyte header images", then maybe a better approach would be to limit the number, or size, of images on each page? Some scientific publications do exactly that in an attempt to force the authors to focus on selecting only the most important images that need to accompany their papers.
No technical limitation is suitable. The appropriate number or size of images depends on the accompanying text. Setting it high enough to allow all legitimate uses makes it weak enough that you might as well have no limit. And even a low limit does nothing to prevent annoying use up to that limit.
The best possible limit is "must convince the reader to click it".
I guess that's a reasonable position to take. It reminds me of paper publications where you have all the figures on color plates bound in the middle/end, so I guess it isn't without precedent
On the other hand, it made me think of old Usenet posts and discussions. That was another medium where you were limited to plain-text only. Posts were often forced to resort to awful ASCII-art drawings of things they wanted to explain and that was just a horrible experience altogether (not to mention how fun those drawings are to decipher today where modern archives have mostly messed up the white space).
Binary attachments were somewhat fiddly in Usenet, AIUI? I don't think MIME/8-bit clean support was really consistently there at the time. In Gemini, you'd just serve it as a binary file.
also not really sure, how a protocol wants to be simpler than http (send bytes to port 80, get bytes, print bytes...) if it has baked in content limitations...
What about "inline images can't be linkable?" Caption text could still link to an enlarged/detailed version. But if images can never be clicked/linked, it would be hard to abuse them for ads the way we see today.
I suspect, were gemini format to catch on, user agents would likely get an option to render images from links inline (either instead of links or as thumbnail previews attached to the links.)
The ability for clients to render the markup as they please is actually one of the most important features, and a stark distinction from HTML, which only has one correct way to render.
I exploit this in my Unnamed Gopher Client[0], a client for the predecessor of the Gemini protocol, where I render links in a familiar files/folder format:
A website can be rendered at different resolutions, with or without stylesheets, in dark mode, in printer-friendly formats, in a text-like format, with user stylesheets, with some elements hidden, as plain text, etc.
True, but at a given resolution, with CSS turned on, and in dark mode all users will basically see the same HTML view. The user can't have a dark mode HTML page unless the web site offers one or the user has an extension that makes a best effort to create one. HTML with complex Javascript rendering makes it hard to give the user control.
The concept of a user agent that gives the user much greater ability to choose how they want to view content could mean each user will:
* Pick their own font, font size, line spacing, margins
* Pick their own text color and background color. Like dark mode, high contrast, etc.
* Choose how linked images are shown: inline, click to load, load in new window, expandable thumbnails, etc
* How sections, section headers are displayed. Add a table of contents? Add a button to jump to the next section? The user can choose.
I like reader view, which gives me the ability to choose how I view HTML, but only when reader view can figure out how to extract the content (sometimes disastrously missing paragraphs of text...)
Most of my list is available as extensions on other browsers [1] (which I'd generally prefer to reduce bloat).
However, in my experience, the DOM for some sites is such a mess that trying to apply user preferences is a hack. I.E. reader view accidentally loses text. Does the implementation Opera has always work? That would be cool, although I'd still avoid Opera for privacy reasons.
Gemini seems to be to throw away all that complexity, which makes user customization easier. I.E. the problem is HTML/JS/DOM complexity, not a browser or its extensions.
This right here should be the headline selling point on Gemini existing as its own separate protocol segregated from standard HTTP.
This thread is the first I've heard, and up until this comment I was thinking in my head, "sheesh, what kind of value proposition would justify that amount of work. I'm just not seeing it."
It's kind of like what REST was meant to be. More about entities than verbs. Cool. I get it now.
The lack of inline links is less about aesthetics and more about predictability. When you request a gemini resource you know that there will be two things happening: a TLS handshake followed by, hopefully, the server response (hopefully with your requested document).
Adding images requires more requests and breaks the concept of "one url/document == one request". I love that I know that my client will do nothing I do not tell it to do.
If you want to use gemini and you want inline images I believe https://proxy.vulpes.one does inline images of some form or other.
That said, images have other issues beyond causing page loads/requests to be unpredictable: they are an accessibility nightmare (as we have seen on the web).
i don't know if you understand what you're saying?? are you suggesting the binary content of a png file be inserted into the text-readable markup for a document? this doesn't make any sense. in-line images are linking to other resources. nobody just copy-pastes the hex content of an image into their website's html, because it will end up being 95% of the file size and a nightmare to look at in your editor.
> they are an accessibility nightmare (as we have seen on the web).
Audio is an accessibility nightmare for people who can't see, text is an accessibility nightmare for people who can't see or people who can't read, German is an accessibility nightmare for people who can't speak German.
At some point we have to accept that not every way something is presented is going to be equally accessible by every person, but the solution isn't to just decide we should jettison a rich form of communication because there is a small subset that can't fully benefit from it. Even books that are expected to be used by people who can see all the images usually describe the purpose of the image, what it is illustrating, and why it was included.
> I love that I know that my client will do nothing I do not tell it to do.
By this line of reasoning, you would have to manually approve every init process that your computer would want to start every time you boot it up.
"images" == "client doing things I don't tell it to do" is completely false. Clients have been built that have configurable policies for loading images and scripts, and they're conceptually very simple and easy to use - e.g. "don't load images by default, click to load temporarily, control-click to load and permanently whitelist" is an example of a user-agent policy that not only supports images, but conforms to your extremely convoluted definition of a user-agent "do[ing] nothing I do not tell it to do."
> requires more requests
Is the purpose of a document browser to minimize requests, or to actually serve useful information? Images can encode data that cannot be encoded in text, and a vast quantity of information is much more easily read and understood in graphical form. If you want to minimize requests, then just don't use the web at all.
Also, this isn't even necessarily the case. You could encode images as part of the page, as base64 or something.
> they are an accessibility nightmare (as we have seen on the web)
The web supports alt-text for images. When people don't provide alt-text, that's not a technical problem, that's a social one.
Images are generally not the point. Formulas, diagrams and illustrations are.
Managing image assets is tedious. The web design community still by and large hasn’t figured out a great standard way to do for images (versions with reversible/cherry-pickable diffs) what git does for code.
Instead, diagrams and formulas could follow the lovely ideas of mermaid, graphviz, dot, and mathjax inlined into the markdown as text. Tooling for VSCode handles inline diagrams beautifully for Markdown already.[1]
And then, inline SVG would let you illustrate nearly anything.
WSJ got by fine without photos, as did most journals for most of my lifetime, and Kindle books mostly don’t have them today. I wouldn’t be too quick to say a medium has to be filled with photos.
I think you might have misunderstood the latter, which just refers to the Gopher model having no transfer resume functionality, such as HTTP Ranges, meaning an interrupted transfer must restart.
About TLS: it means the spec requires Gemini to be encapsulated in TLS; the same way RFC 2616 recommends HTTP be encapsulated in both TCP and IP ("HTTP communication usually takes place over TCP/IP connections"). Yes, technically they are abstraction violations, but they are commonplace for network protocols.
about network instability: it doesn't refer to congestion and packet loss handling in TCP, but to the "Range" feature of HTTP, which allows downloading only a subset of a file, to resume an interrupted TCP connection.
I feel similar. Projects like gemini work, because they are niche, not despite it. If it became mainstream similar forces that drive the web to what it is woule take hold.
Yeah, designers would hack around the limitations until the hacks become official (against the original protocol inventors' intent, if necessary), because every company wants to control the experience of their content to an unreasonable degree. I recently turned off the "Allow pages to choose their own fonts" setting in Firefox, and it's refreshing to read text in O(1) rather than O(N) fonts. Now if only similar tweaks were as easy to apply to web forms, menus etc.
Thank the gods it was! I'm still traumatised by the <blink>-tags and dancing banana GIFs of the old days...
I mean, sure - 404 pages with dry "Oops" or "Not found" messages are way more boring, but I really don't miss getting to see GOATSE or TUB GIRL (don't look up either if you're not familiar with it) every other time I click an outdated link...
There's very little that works if it's development is driven by a community as large and diverse (in terms of sometimes opposing interests and goals) as "the public".
How is introducing yet another new technology, incompatible with what everyone else is using, any better than just creating a minimalist static HTML website?
How is the issue not bloated websites? You can easily create a text only website in HTML which is compatible with every existing internet capable device. All technology can be misused, it isn’t necessarily a problem with the underlying technology. By introducing yet more standards and technologies, you end up creating bloat and fragmentation of a different kind.
There is also an allure of having a client that will never run some weird god-know-what-doing javascript code.
Of course you can just disable javascript in your HTTP browser. But as the author states, it's easier to write a completely new client than to disable all the bloat in e.g. firefox.
Agreed, but like I’ve said elsewhere the effort would be better spent modifying an existing browser to be lightweight. That would gain more widespread adoption than a whole new client-server protocol. You’d also gain the benefit of better interoperability with screen readers and such like.
Nobody involved in Gemini wants "widespread adoption", because that inevitably means big commercial organisations coming into the space where right now they're having a lovely time building a community.
Screen readers handle Gemini just fine - one of the clients I've tried outputs text and buttons in a GTK window, another literally just outputs text into a terminal and takes command line input, if a screenreader couldn't handle that I'd be horrified. The format is paragraph-based, there's very little styling, no guessing at what the main content on a page is.
So you say the "effort". There are 50-some line gemini clients, and more than a few people have coded graphical clients in a few days by themselves. Same with servers. Is modifying firefox or palemoon really going to be a "better spent" effort?
I think screen readers can read text pretty well, also, since you've declared that to be a goal for some reason.
Unfortunately, having worked on both Chromium and Firefox, I can inform you that modifying an existing browser to be lightweight is an unfeasible project.
It's a waste of time compared to just making something new. That doesn't mean that normal browsers couldn't also get gopher support for those not interested in a lightweight browser.
> Because the problem is the technology everyone else is using
Introducing new technology doesn't change the technology everyone else is using if it doesn’t provide a reason for them to switch. Gemini seems to appeal very much to the issues of a very narrow group of users and, I suspect, an even smaller proportion of content creators. I don't see how it has any effect on the technology everyone else is using.
It's a subculture. I think the key is in the definition of 'everyone'; I doubt anybody imagines everybody in the world switching to Gemini from the web. So 'everyone' in this context means all the people who have collectively agreed to stick to minimal text format.
You could try the same thing with a community dedicated to minimal HTML--heck, you could say that's what HN itself is, almost--but it would have no effective border. You'd keep falling back into the bad old web. This makes the border explicit, instead.
Good point, but I doubt there will be any kind of meaningful adoption, I think the effort would be better spent modding chromium or such like to strip out crap from existing websites rather than creating a new client-server protocol.
Because it's not about the individual, but rather it's about the ecosystem.
From an individual point of view, there's not much of a difference. If I wanted to migrate my blog to Gemini, it would take very little and it would lose almost nothing. But the second you click a link to another domain you are back in the bloated web.
Once you open a Gemini page, however, you know exactly which experience you are getting. No bloated websites are allowed, so you won't see those at all,ever.
No mention of JS; not even a Gemini server in Node[0]. Finally a sane place to hang out! Kidding, but only half. The 'everything must be done in JS' is fairly annoying imho.
I think calling gemini an alternative to the web has a very limited view of the web. It takes an idea someone has of what the web should be: a set of text documents. That's a very small subset of the web, not just of today.
Building separate protocols for all the various use-cases of the web would be interesting, but would still need some interconnection. But I'm not convinced that has many advantages besides not being accidentally linked to a websited of the "Old web." A problem that could be reduced by a browser extension that strictly blocks any external urls and javascript.
The separate protocol for everything is essentially what things were like prior to about 1994.
There was a protocol for searching documents, a protocol for looking up someone's email, it was all partitioned out.
The web was seen as just another fish in the pond.
After the web became big, these things still lasted for a while
However spam and crooks changed it all. Usenet became useless, DNS full domain lookups (you used to be able to get a list of all the subdomains of a domain through the command line and you could just browse then out of curiosity), using whois for email (you could just query for a name and get an email address over whois), it's all gone because there's too many snakes trying to scam people and flood the network.
Things used to be much better tools but it turns out they were too good and had no defenses. The dream of everybody connecting has sort of been retracted a bit. RMS, TBL, Torvalds, I could just send them an email in the 90s and they'd respond, it was pretty remarkable.
It's not the case any more. Not even minor players in history (such as an author from a 25 year old book) respond to my questions. People just don't do that anymore.
Spam, harassment, criminals, ill will, this all has to be a big priority if we want to try it again.
The future should be the dreams of our better angels, building better tomorrows...
This is an exceptionally good point. Security is also one of the top problems with the web (alongside the asymmetrical difficulty of hosting content vs consuming it and the lack of consistency for web content). The problems with the web are mitigated by "good enough" solutions from browser vendors, out-of-band third party extensions and even some services on the web itself (e.g. archive.org, though I don't know how sustainable that is, and it's far from perfect).
> RMS, TBL, Torvalds, I could just send them an email in the 90s and they'd respond, it was pretty remarkable.
I don't think this stopped just because of spam, harassment, or other bad behavior. A big part of it is just community size. When the community of internet users was smaller, you could interact with everyone who reached out in a reasonable amount of time. As it got bigger, that is no longer possible because of the sheer number of people.
This would be interesting for a terminal based web alternative. A practical use would be something like O'Reilly's Safari Books Online.
The author mentions that fancy Gemini reader apps could allow linking to images, since that some terminals allow images to be displayed[1] that would fit nicely too.
Why not just use text based websites and something like w3m? Well it's hard to tell when opening a link in the terminal will be useful and when it would be better to open the link in a "real" browser like Firefox.
e.g. after a git push to github I'm provided with a link to create a PR. I really when I click that link I really want it to open in Firefox.
[1] Off the top of my head Kitty and iTerm2 both allow image display from apps such as the ranger file manager.
I just wish they had not insisted on TLS and closing connections. It defeats the purpose to me because you are going to be delayed constantly by new TLS startups.
It feels like the main feature of this project is incompatibility with HTTP. The protocol is new and primitive, it's easy to write tools around it, write texts about it, etc. A small community forms, and you're part of it. You can advertise it to others, or rant against the mainstream, or whatever. But now what? You lose interest and abandon it, and eventually it dies.
We already have a transport protocol that "everybody" agrees on: HTTP. We can define a specification for a subset of it, and a subset of HTML/browser features we want, create tools around them, and form a small community.
The advantage here is that the community is not an island. Users of Big Browser can still read your latest rants. They can even learn about this project and, while perhaps not using Mom-and-Pop browser, may support it in their sites, since it wouldn't require another server; mostly just having their site work without JavaScript would be a huge step forward. Right, you don't have Google filtering based on Accessibility. The community can create a search engine that does. Now what? You just get on with your life, producing and consuming AccessibleWeb content without the gratuitous incompatibility.
I totally agree with that. It is not like some web police force is holding people at gunpoint to add javascript and angular or react. People use all those features because they want to and they find it useful.
This protocol doesn't seem to be aimed at commercial use, but the "web police" called "the manager" or "the marketing department" or whatever are the ones forcing the use of the privacy-invading tools.
The original Facebook and Google did not use much JavaScript, so I'm always skeptical when literal documents need it for anything other than ads (and even then...).
I never understood the hangup on screen refreshes - I mean, why is it important that the screen doesn't refresh?
And if it's that important that EVERYBODY deploys JS to render client side to avoid the refreshes, why isn't this handled at the browser level in the first place (i.e. declare "ExtendDisplayTime"-something on your document and the browser should replace the screen content only AFTER the new page is completely painted).
But at the core of it, the web is a document-display system, and back-hammering and shoe-horning apps that masquerade as documents will always be painful.
Maybe, instead of the spec allowing/banning javascript, it would only allow usage of curated list of "apps" to be part of the page ?
For example, i'm thinking of a roam research like content platform, without tracking and ads. It would be interesting to see shared content around that.
Legacy and momentum plays a greater role in adopting a framework than sheer choice. If I could choose I would use frameworks in haskell or rust 100% of the time where I work. I don't because there is nothing built around it there and I need to get the job done right now. I would like to be the change I want to see, but sometimes there is just not enough time.
That is a solid point, at the end of the day, programming languages and frameworks are just tools we use to build a product that has some use to someone (Be that monetary value or art or whatever). At work, it is almost always better to just iterate on the existing tool stack rather than try to spool up new one. I love writing Rust, but I'd need a good reason (or at least a big project to amortize the cost over) to reach for it over the existing very function c++ libraries I already use for our embedded work.
While web sites can avoid JavaScript all right, browsing most sites does require JavaScript. As a NoScript user, I'm keenly aware of how many web sites simply do not work without JavaScript.
And I'm not even talking about all the third party spyware.
If you're already using uBlock Origin you can disable JS per site (or by default, like NoScript). I've found that the UI is way easier to understand compared to NoScript.
I'm not sure what you would gain from disabling things like the ability to upload multiple files, autocomplete fields and rich text editing. Raging against and disabling Javascript is just stupid in my viewpoint. I'm not going to cut out absolutely essential features just to satisfy some fringe group.
What if JS over gemini:// would only be able to render some things and would not have network access?
It just is a question of what your html renderer allows.
Add Lua if you think that's better!
But you will have the same problems if embedded Lua can do network stuff.
...or let's just P2P our Emacsens... the last non divisive browser... :-P
gemini doesn't at the moment have any formalized systems for client-side scripting, effectively eliminating the need for that, and most of the gemini community seems pretty opposed to ever implementing such a thing, so it doesn't seem like that will ever change.
This is more intended to be a comfier gopher than a less-shitty http. Most of its early adherents are ex-phloggers attracted to its features relative to gopher, not ex-webbers attracted to its lack of client-side scripting or whatever.
The fact that this has attracted a fair number of gopher users (who have always very strongly opposed http/s) would seem proof enough of it's success, imo, at least within particular circles, and at least within the context of its goals. It was never intended to draw people away from the web, it was intended to be a sort of superpowered gopher.
Actually they do.
If you do not fill in your taxes, which are powered by JavaScript, people with hubs are going to come for you and take you hostage, I. Order to rob you from your “tax” money..
I am mostly with you. It should be a subset of http. And the content should be a subset of html/css/js --- but the schema ought to have a different prefix. So if I navigate to acc://example.com, Mom-and-Pop browser would perform the same steps that Big Browser would take to fetch http://example.com
This allows hyperlinking to the accessible version of a page, and using different default browsers for the different protocols, so that I (as someone who wants to use Mom-and-Pop browser) can easily fall back to Big Browser when necessary to view a page that won't render over accs://
And part of that restricted spec would allow linking only to such links, to stay within the network ?
And the biggest challenge with Gemini is creating a great search engine. But now , searching site:gemini.* KEYWORD , gives us the power of Google and other search engines.
> And part of that restricted spec would allow linking only to such links, to stay within the network ?
Doesn't work over time. You link somewhere, the other site owner a month later decides they want to use Google Analytics, now you're linking your readers back to the web they're trying to avoid.
> And the biggest challenge with Gemini is creating a great search engine.
Not really, it's discovery in general, which can be solved in many ways that don't involve search engines; Wikipedia's references are often a good discovery tool, for example. I use aggregators to find Gemini content and follow discussions which are happening across the space.
Yeah, so what you really need is a browser that only supports your subset. It’ll ensure that whatever sites you view are fast/safe/whatever, but Gemini sites you make will be equally accessible to users of “legacy” browsers.
Except that then 99% of people reading your page will be using Firefox, so it's not that big of a deal to just say fuck it and not do this whole SafeHTML thing any more when you want that one extra feature in a year. The 1% of readers who cared are just a minority.
The entire purpose here is to build a community of people who care about this sort of thing, who write content for that community, where taking your content away from that community is not an easy decision of adding a <script> or <style> tag.
Missing 99% of your potential readers is a big problem, though.
Maybe there's another way?
For example, Gemini could only link through a centralized link management server, and that link server will verify links to be "clean" , and if a link isn't clean it will become dead ?
Of course, that depends whether said link gets most of his traffic from within Gemini or outside.
I spend most of my time in small spaces - 100 people, max, of who about 10 might be around at any given time. I'm not worried that people are going to miss what I have to say, because I'm talking to the people who are there. The people who aren't might as well be irrelevant.
Have you ever spent any time in small communities? It's lovely to just... not have to care about gaining followers or making arbitrary counters go up or whatever it is people do, and just talk/create for the sake of it. There's no "brand" to care about.
Counterpoint: All these brain structures that make us crave power and influence evolved in a time in which humans exclusively dealt with small communities (going by your "100 people max" criterion).
Many users also expect javascript-heavy experiences, that they'll be tracked across the web, and that every resource they're likely to access on the internet is commercial in nature. Gemini is quite explicitly a project to try different things.
> You link somewhere, the other site owner a month later decides they want to use Google Analytics, now you're linking your readers back to the web they're trying to avoid.
What if instead of a direct link, there was an intermediary that verified that the source and target of the link conformed to spec? If either side didn't conform, the link would just not work. Ideally the intermediary would be built in to the source's web server for privacy reasons. If the target site decided to quit and break spec, people could still access the site from links posted outside of the network.
Incompatibility with HTTP is a feature, and a good one at that. It's drawing a line in the sand: this is bad, and we don't want to be a part of it. We don't want a subset of HTTP. We don't want a subset of browser features. Yes, we are fully aware that it would not work with "modern" "browsers". We want something which isn't rotten from the start. We don't want to click a link and end up back on another maggot infested pile of JavaScript crap - we want a network where everyone who's playing is playing on a sane baseline.
The whole point of this project is to shrug off legacy. Yes, that means reinventing a few wheels.
I wonder if everyone in this thread is willfully missing the point, or else if we're just so deep into the brainwashing of the modern web that they can no longer see the surface.
> meaning the net effect is just to make browsers more complicated.
Maybe it would, slightly. But would it make the browser anymore complicated then the unessential features that Firefox has in its default build right now?
Pocket integration, FF Sync, some screenshot function?
The web is so broken that my Firefox even has some Protection Dashboard thing (about:protections). Not that I've ever used or noticed it before.
I’m just not convinced that HTML and especially HTTP are “rotten to the core”. You can make http://motherfuckingwebsite.com and the markup is all very clean.
the markup might be clean but it's pretty ugly and network inefficient because it's full of boilerplate that is only required because html also supports 1000 times more nonsense than this site uses, so you have to type <p></p> to render every line of that text, or <a href=""></a> to just render a link. you need to do <h></h> for headings. if all you want to do in your content is those things, that markup is ridiculous.
I like tiny communities as much as anyone but I personally see no need for this to exist. Firefox might consume 2GB but it is also running hundreds of tabs. 8GB of RAM was more than enough. On Linux I rarely went over 4.5GB. Worst offenders are JVM based applications. Notably modded Minecraft can consume absurd amounts of RAM.
I'm more terrified of the average electron app or java app than I am scared of a single browser tab.
If you a looking for a 1:1 clone for the early web, you will probably be disapointed. Gemini takes way more design hints from Gopher then it ever will from the web.
It looks to be a reimagined gopher with some early web parts. Which makes me wonder how close their protocol is to the gopher one.
in terms of semantics it is almost entirely dissimilar except that it's line-oriented. instead of having any of the content type fields or whatever which enforce half of gopher's grammar, links are just "=> gemini://some.url/tunes.mp3", and when you hit that content it gives you a header with a mime type telling you it's an mp3. so now you don't need any of the structure of gopher and can treat literally everything but links as raw text, and clients can optionally format some agreed-upon subset of markdown, and otherwise, that subset of markdown is so readable without formatting that you don't even really need it.
this means you can create a far simpler protocol semantically: requests are just the uri, responses are just a header of a two digit response code and the mime type, and the rest of the response is just the content as raw text. that's the entire protocol grammar.
A subset of HTTP and HTML is not an option if you want to keep existing semantics. Both are by default broken, unsafe and unusable on some systems, so you will need boilerplate that clutters your subsets unnecessarily, e.g. a crapload of headers like "Content-Security-Policy", META-headers ("viewport") etc.
Just create servers that consume AccessibleHTML, and then adulterate it into fancy regular HTTP/HTML for consumption by most UAs (or, optionally, leave it alone for consumption by UAs that send a `X-Rendering-Policy: AccessibleHTML` header. Either way you can still get at the "real" AccessibleHTML source by sending `Cache-Control: no-transform`.) Think of these as "AccessibleWeb to RegularWeb gateways"—except they'd be deployed as reverse-proxies, so RegularWeb users wouldn't have to know they were there.
This is similar to the driving motivation behind RSS: it was supposed to be something for simple static sites to put up, such that gateways could then poll it, before turning around and doing something more technologically-complex to actually deliver the events, like using WebHooks, or sending emails, or doing whatever PuSH does.
This is how I am approaching one of my app framework projects. HTTP is the delivery vehicle, but I only utilize a very small subset of the various full APIs (HTTP/HTML/JS/CSS) in order to deliver the framework's functionality. One of my objectives is for the framework to support a wider range of browsers than most modern websites are able to handle today. If vendors like Apple and Google begin fully-embracing things like PWA, I could wind up in a really good position regarding this approach.
Well said. The problem with the Gemini protocol and its proponents is that they are trying to push a protocol (if you can call it that) which makes no sense when what they want to achieve can be achieved much more easily using an alternate approach.
This is like pushing for stone cart wheels when spoked wheels are already available.
For instance, if the issue is with the use of cookies, all they need to implement is a mechanism for the server to not respond to cookies in any form.
If there issue is with other forms of tracking, they could implement a browser which supports a small subset of the HTTP protocol which does not allow any tracking of any kind.
> If there issue is with other forms of tracking, they could implement a browser which supports a small subset of the HTTP protocol which does not allow any tracking of any kind.
They did. That's the Gemini protocol. I recommend reading the spec to properly understand the constraints they were trying to meet.
With a text like this, you can’t blame the readers assuming incompatibility and losing interest
> Now, what does Gemini currently have to offer? The best way to find out is to head over to the official site: gemini.circumlunar.space in your Gemini browser.
The Gemini protocol throws away a huge number of advances - in effect throwing the baby out with the bath water.
Gemini protocol could have been a subset of HTTP and the document format could have been a subset of HTML. For instance, if you decide to not implement cookies, javascript etc but if you retain the ability to have formatting for texts, tables, images etc it would have been sufficient.
And even in the case of images, the protocol could have mandated that images cannot be accessed cross-site. The same restrictions could have been placed on other aspects such as the style sheets.
The problem is that deciding upon a strictly limited subset of HTTP and HTML, slapping a label on it and calling it a day would do almost nothing to create a clearly demarcated space where people can go to consume only that kind of content in only that kind of way. It's impossible to know in advance whether what's on the other side of a https:// URL will be within the subset or outside it. It's very tedious to verify that a website claiming to use only the subset actually does, as many of the features we want to avoid are invisible (but not harmless!) to the user. It's difficult or even impossible to deactivate support for all the unwanted features in mainstream browsers, so if somebody breaks the rules you'll pay the consequences. Writing a dumbed down web browser which gracefully ignores all the unwanted features is much harder than writing a Gemini client from scratch. Even if you did it, you'd have a very difficult time discovering the minuscle fraction of websites it could render.
Nothing is keeping it as a demarcated space other than the same conventions that you would have to follow anyway if you followed a "minimal subset" approach. You could easily write a Gemini client that handles application/javascript. In fact if this protocol got any level of popularity, I would expect that to happen extremely quickly.
> would do almost nothing to create a clearly demarcated space where people can go to consume only that kind of content in only that kind of way.
That misses the fact that people don't want any of that; people just want to continue using the current infrastructure without functionalities that rely on a limited subset of features made available by the current infrastructure.
And that doesn't justify the effort of reinventing the wheel.
Clearly some people do want that, though, especially here. Evey week or so we have a thread about how terrible the modern web is and inevitably there's a subthread about how someone just needs to create an extremist, minimal fork of HTML with no CSS and no JS and create a new, hip web with blackjack and hookers.
I imagine the exclusivity of something like this is part of the appeal. They don't want to be part of the current infrastructure, they don't want to interact with it, or anyone on it.
This doesn't make much sense. You can clearly demarcate it by replacing the "http" in the URL with "httpsubset" or something, and by running it on a separate port.
You can constrain the features used by an HTML document using CSP headers. For example setting "img-src 'none'; style-src 'none'" will disable images and CSS styling. So this comment is wrong, basically.
I wonder what magic technology they use that makes Gemini servers more discoverable than a regular website. It certainly can't be a Gemini specific search engine because Gemini doesn't have a monopoly on search engines.
I wonder if the main usage of the internet isn't the web as we think about it, but largely facebook, youtube, twitter, maybe some google+wikipedia. People don't see it in terms of 'websites' anymore.
yes I think websites are becoming anachronical at that point.. web will fade into ubiquitous peers for high bandwidth data exchange. messages, multimedia, ar/vr .. the end result will be what matter.
I dunno. I see a backlash happening, people building their own blog sites again. The whole "push to your own site, then syndicate that link to social media" thing seems to be happening more.
I'm tempted to creat a new GeoCities and see how that goes for non-technical folks
I don't think this will last. It's not my personal opinion or preference, I care few about the modern web but to me .. watching people interacting with computers, browsers and how they use whatsapp or instagram .. I see no value for them[0] into the early simple web. It's like betting against television in the 90s.
[0] meaning in the average folk psychology, of course a simpler cleaner web has value, just not to them AFAIB
A lot of people seem to believe that, yet plenty of people have to deal with commercial sites, bank sites, school sites, etc., to say nothing of the third party sites linked to by aggregators. I think people still know what websites are.
For most people email is just gmail.com or outlook.com. They don't realize that email is another protocol separate from the web. I am talking from personal experience :D
I think that is the case especially with Smartphones and Apps. The Internet isn't about "Web" anymore. Even Hyperlinks points to "Apps".
However Web still has its place in Google, Wiki, and Shopping. The three things has one thing in common in that they need multiple tabs to keep data and Information.
From my POV facebook is not a app on my devices but access via the web, meaning html, https, a ton of java and whatever adopted php facebook uses today. What i don't get about this project is why it should need it's own browser beside for the user adaptability that you could technically do via a browser plugin, not to reinvent the wheel all together. Coming from the BBS world i like this idea however, but will miss the illustrations (read pictures). Will however give it a go.
I do not see the "incompatibility". There is a web-to-gemini gateway at https://portal.mozz.us which I think is an example to how easy it is to write one.
Big Browser is the cause of so many problems that people on HN complain about. Without the control over Big Browser that certain offending corporations have, their empires are considerably weaker.
Mom-and-Pop Browser is probably not an accurate caricature. Maybe something like End User Browser is more apropos.
If most HTTP is being sent over TLS these days, and Gemini is also over TLS, one could argue there is no "incompatibility". Gemini just doesn't need to all the extra ad-hoc functionality that has been built on top of HTTP. It is intended for data retrieval, not something that relies on help from the 20+ million lines of code in Big Browser to achieve.
Gopher will be faster by nature of gemini using TLS. However, gopher is inherently less secure than gemini. If you are wanting the TLS, gemini _should_ load your document faster than the https (even with minimal headers included for the https version, there is still more header overhead to just make the request and there is a lot more header overhead in most responses).
"When I picture it in my head I think of the early web as more of a library.
Over time it has transitioned into a shopping mall."
- chris_f (Hacker News comments)
There are still books in a shopping mall. You have to know where to look and not get distracted at every corner, though.
356 comments
[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 295 ms ] threadHow is a network protocol proof against being used to transport CSS files? Does the network stack inspect what you're shipping and ensure you're only sending 100% Pure Plain Text?
> The Gemini transport protocol is unsuitable for the transfer of large files, since it misses many features that protocols such as FTP or HTTP use to recover from network instability.
Isn't that TCP's job? Is this person saying Gemini doesn't use TCP?
Finally:
> Now, what does Gemini currently have to offer? The best way to find out is to head over to the official site: gemini.circumlunar.space in your Gemini browser.
Back in the Gopher days, my "Gemini browser" would be my Web browser. That was one of the reasons Web browsers took off: You could use them to access all of the information on the Internet, including the WWW, Gopher, Usenet, and Email. Only more recently did Mozilla morph from the Netscape Communicator software suite into the slimmed-down Firefox browser without email, spinning off Thunderbird in the process, and only much later did Firefox drop Gopher support from the core binary.
maybe he’s talking about higher level features, like the possibility to restart a download from a certain point, without redownloading the initial part? haven’t used this since dialup days, though
That said, I can't tell whether or not I've used it recently. I know I don't use it when I play with personal projects, but I don't know what other sites do because I rarely have a console pulled up in my browser when I'm just using it, rather than developing.
> Gemini has no support for caching, compression, or resumption of interrupted downloads. As such, it's not very well suited to distributing large files, for values of "large" which depend upon the speed and reliability of your network connection.
https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html
The Gemini specification includes its own format for pages, which is a text-based scheme inspired by Markdown and Gopher menus. You can use the Gemini protocol to transmit things other than Gemini pages, sort of like how you can use HTTP to transmit PDFs and Word documents, but you wouldn't build your whole site out of them. (At least that's my impression, I haven't gotten around to actually visiting many Gemini sites yet.)
It's just like the web, the transport protocol (HTTP/S) can be used on any file. But there is a separate spec for the document format (HTML etc.). You could transport CSS over Gemini, just don't expect any of the browsers to render it. Just like how web browsers won't execute alternate scripting languages natively.
> Isn't that TCP's job? Is this person saying Gemini doesn't use TCP?
I didn't really elaborate on this point while writing, because I had nothing to add. I will quote from the projects FAQ:
>> Gemini has no support for caching, compression, or resumption of interrupted downloads. As such, it's not very well suited to distributing large files, for values of "large" which depend upon the speed and reliability of your network connection.
Hopefully that clears up what I meant.
> Back in the Gopher days, my "Gemini browser" would be my Web browser.
You might be interested in Castor[1]. It's a browser for the minimalist internet. Rolls support for Gemini, Gopher and Finger all in one.
I can understand why FF removed support. But hopefully smaller applications, like Castor, can fill this gap.
[1]: https://sr.ht/~julienxx/Castor/
Which honestly is pretty silly, as lots of caching is about reducing latency for small files not saving bandwidth for large files. Suppose it matters less if the documents are self contained.
If Gemini is ever of even domain-specific serious use, I'd expect both the format and protocol to be added to what is supported by existing major web browsers (it can't be both tractable for small implementers and intractable for Apple/Google/Mozilla), which, as it turns out, know how to support the combination of HTML/CSS/JS just fine and won't likely forget just because a different transfer protocol is involved. Presenting a DOM mapping for Gemini format pages and exposing it at least to extensions even if there is no way to include page scripts doesn't seem unlikely, either.
The creator of Gemini has a post about this, linked above.
Probably won’t stop someone from trying.
(Nothing stopping you from building a browser that handles gemini format documents and does special things with JS links, either, though to avoid accidental execution issues you would probably need to extend the format to distinguish “links I want to execute” from other links.)
Setting it up on a separate protocol / markup allows you to make hard reasoning about what kind of privacy, features and protection you get as a user, rather than relying on the goodwill or current promises of your content provider.
It'd be better to declare a new doctype and use a reduced html. Just make it simple and make ads and JS bloat impossible.
Enforcing ssl is kind of silly since browsers are starting to do that anyway independent of this. It's orthogonal.
If you open the Gemini link posted below about why just defining a new doctype wouldn’t work, give it a read.
If you're building a protocol that enforces certain strict standards, like in this case being text only because the internet is 'bloated' according to the author, then the only point of having it is adoption beyond your community.
If all you want to do is communicate with ardent non-bloat advocates you can already do this on the regular internet, because everyone in that community does it voluntarily already
There's no point in codyfing standards for a community that follows your standards to begin with
This would seem to be a similar sort of issue to when people say "come chat on IRC", or use a mailing list to communicate about a project, or whatever else - you're not going to use those if all you ever want to use is a web browser. And that's ok in my book. I'll hang out with the people who do want to use those tools.
If Gemini catches on, someone will write an add-on for Firefox that reads it. And then it's just part of the Web that is fast and looks a little different.
And that link is a long-winded way of saying "It's good to put an artificial barrier in the way."
Just because you can do that, does not make it part of the Web -- it's still a different space. Those portals are basically web-based clients to the protocol, which means they're still bound by the rules of the protocol -- they're not going to have JS in them, for example.
So it's absolutely become adopted beyond its beginning community.
On the technical side of things, it looks like its an old battle replayed with older weapons, just to get go through the same path of HTML. "Oh, but we will not put more features". Ok, but people wont use it then because they can also serve text, markdown, etc... and can chill out, because they know if later they need to serve images, videos or graphics, they can do it with HTML.
And i say this as a person who is also trying to create some alternatives to the web. But instead of going back to the nineties, i tried to think how the technology of 10 years ahead would look like. I've probably not maded it because its really hard to push the envelop when things are almost in the state of the art as Web is. But i also don't think the answer for the future will be in the past.
You know what i think would be a really badass movement. To create a simple spec of the Web, even without Javascript. Because with "feature creep" Google through Chrome is making impossible for others players to create competing browser engines.
So if two folks decide that they will create a web engine in this new language they like, it wont be an impossible goal. Because there's this simple version of the spec, with much less features.
The people behind this might be very good at convincing people and real believers, this thing can float for some time working real hard for this.. But it will be really hard to get this out of a small niche.
Anyway i love the thinking behind this. The meditation, the koan, is really on the right track. We need more rebels and fighters on this front. But i just can see it, how this can compete as a subset of a massively popular and deployed protocol with clients everywhere? How can it really differentiate itself, apart from what the web today already can serve to people?
When you link to a Gemini URL, you're linking to something you know can't be replaced with something privacy-violating in the future. The worst that can happen is the server shuts down, which is a very different failure mode. And someone is less likely to do that than to switch to a different brand of HTML - or so's the hope.
It's not going to be a major thing that everyone uses. That's ok! Neither is IRC, mailing lists, and whatever else - but people still use them, every day. There's ideas exchanged, friendships made, relationships formed, and they serve a not-insignificant community's needs.
Ok, but you know the big majority of the users dont care were the content come from, or how its delivered to them. They care about what is being served instead of how.
If you guys manage to have some 'killer apps' on this protocol, where people will try to reach it no matter how its is implemented, than there's a chance.
IRC killer app is IRC itself, and they manage to push themselves as alternative in the nineties where a lot of popular protocols and alternatives like the web were still in the beginning.
Anyway, if you convince people over time to serve their content through this medium, with enough and interesting content, the user will try/learn to reach them.
But i dont know, i think at least they should be trying to use some p2p DNS system, making it easy for people to serve their own content, or revisit BBS and serve contents in tree-like structures akin to directories..
I feel that there must be something to really differentiate it from everything else. Some things that are unique, and that the web + others are not covering. Because if you think about IRC or Email, they have distinct features that web could never cover even being a mammoth protocol, while this doesnt hold the same way when you think of Gemini proposal.
Anyway, people trying to do something, to change things for what they perceive as the better is a good thing, and it should always be celebrated, because even when the thing doesn't stick it might need adjustments, incremental evolution or just to serve as a influence to something else or through experience inspire the creators to create something even better.
Who, exactly, without a profit motive, wants the majority of users? I don't want to talk to most people, and I don't want most people to read what I have to say. I, like most people I think, want to spend most of my time in my community sharing things I find interesting with people in my community.
It's the same as tilde servers, or MUDs. They're not going to take over the world. They're small communities and most people will never even know they exist, and that's fine.
[1] gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/cornedbeef/why-not-just-use-a-subset-of-http-and-html.gmi
I’m still not sold on it (you’re allowed to do websites without js/css!), but the effort and skill involved is commendable
When you visit a gemini URL, you know how it's going to serve you a limited capability, text based document, styled according to your own rules.
He goes on to say 'Supposing you had such a browser, what would you do with it? The overwhelming majority of websites would not render correctly on it.' - A very good point, but equally applicable to a Gemini browser.
IMO, they have confused the network protocol with the presentation. You don't need to drop HTTP in order to change the way websites look. Likewise, you don't have to implement HTTP features that you don't like (e.g. cookies). This just strikes me as another mistaken belief that rewriting code from scratch will solve all your problems.
I’ve always wished browsers handle site menus in their chrome, so that the document can be focused on content not navigation. It’s the browsers job!
For a while Opera supported these related links in the head for some pages but the dev was unable to add their own, it was limited to a small number of standard items such as Index. These were shown in a browser toolbar.
Nonstandard navigation have always been a point of friction for users as it precludes universal access by having to relearn how each site works.
I know it is an idealogical choice to only have text, but being able to embed standard image formats (on a totally plain, non fancy way) would increase the utility of this hugely. They mention blogs and tutorials and recipes here - those would benefit hugely from having simple inline images within the body of the text, just like you expect in a newspaper etc.
I guess I am not the target market then.
I can even understand why they did it. To keep the doc format very simple.
I hope that more clients will add unique rendering features that will turn this drawback on it's head. It could be in-line rendering or a gallery-like feature.
Technical paper is what I was thinking about there. Furthermore, since Gemini apparently lacks support for mathematical notation images would be necessary for such even if the paper doesn't intrinsically contain non-textual images (e.g. pictures, charts, or graphs, which are common though not universal).
If I were designing it, I would say: "you can have images, but they always display as a 'block element', with nothing to either side. No worries about wrapping text; no background images under other elements, etc." I think that keeps the spirit of simplicity.
It's text. The client displays that text and renders links, headings, etc, however it wishes. If it really wants to, it could just not format them at all. There's a gemini client made for plan9's acme text editor that doesn't render links, and instead displays them verbatim, because the plan9 plumber can handle the hyperlinking aspect. All of that is eye candy and fluff.
If a client finds a link to an image, it can in-line it if it wants. If you wrote a client, when it found a link to an image, it would in-line it "with nothing to either side." That's not something that has to be specced.
Same with how headers are displayed (maybe i want folding or something), whether an ToC is displayed, colours, fonts, etc.
The point is that the user can decide all this stuff, without having to hack it around the author's own styles and scripts.
I would really like to see structured text that is self-descriptive (e.g. this is the document title, this is a paragraph, this is a header, bullet list, etc.) but have no ability to influence HOW those things are displayed- eventually maybe we'll have browsers that can support rich theming, etc.
Others have noted that lack of images is an oversight. Perhaps the language needs a "binary file download" structure, and if the binary in question is a media file, then the browser could choose to display it. Maybe signal with mime types?
What I'm saying is that there can't be a format that isn't hacked and exploited to allow the publisher to do what they want, because ultimately it's their content so they control it. Maybe limiting the existing tags in HTML is a good idea (AFAIK that's one of the strategies of AMP) but reinventing a structured format will just lead to HTML-but-less.
If you want to give control to user, then you have to do that from the User Agent: forbid any publisher-provided styling, allow only certain tags, are going to actually do what you want, instead of inventing yet another format
Worth noting that this is modern browsers/web, and was initially not like this.
The term "user-agent" comes from that the _user_ has control over the experience, no matter what the publisher thinks. The agent (browser) acts for the user, hence user-agent.
User-agent CSS files were rampant back in the days, when a lot of content was unstyled. So you could navigate between websites and they looked the same, as they would use your user agent css files.
But then everyone decided they had to have a unique look on the web (CSS). Then they decided they needed unique functionality on the web (JavaScript). And here we are :)
users then predictably wanted pages to look different, to have style, and that's likely the principal cause of user stylesheets' decline, not corporate coercion. that's not to argue against user stylesheets per se, but that they'll likely never have wide usage.
It's also the reason why it caught on. On one hand people reject the ability to express individuality on the web, on the other a similar crowd is nostalgic about geocities and praises similar revivals. It's either one or the other.
> I would really like to see structured text that is self-descriptive (e.g. this is the document title, this is a paragraph, this is a header, bullet list, etc.) but have no ability to influence HOW those things are displayed- eventually maybe we'll have browsers that can support rich theming, etc.
How about publishing markdown over HTTPS? Then make a client that renders just that?
For that matter you can serve images or whatever binary files as individual requests (that is, not inline with another repsonse).
I've been playing with it and I rather like it.
I like to think about books as of an example where content is way more important than presentation. Most of the web sites these days spend a lot more effort on how you present it than what, in the end a 1000 thousand words article now has a very complex architecture behind it, hundreds or thousands of time more than the content.
Hence the idea of a separate markdown only browser. I don’t think http is the problem here. So it would be better to reuse as much existing tech as possible.
Note: Personally I don’t think it would catch on, the convenience of handling everything in one program is just too high.
Soo umm. Just use netscape 2.0 (+modern TLS)
Everything I find on Gemini will be compatible with my browser.
> Gemini lacks in-line images
This is the only part that I don't really understand about Gemini. Even the most basic printed publications can include illustrations. <img> got added to HTML very early on because sometimes it's hard to share some piece of information in anything but a visual form.
I write a (mostly) technical blog that certainly focuses more on text content than images. I would be happy to throw away the header, sidebar and the rest of the "design" cruft (in fact my blog is perfectly usable in a browser that doesn't support CSS or Javascript) But I can't imagine having my posts without graphs, diagrams and photos inserted in the text.
If the fear is that in-line images would lead to frivolous use as ads or "useless multi-megabyte header images", then maybe a better approach would be to limit the number, or size, of images on each page? Some scientific publications do exactly that in an attempt to force the authors to focus on selecting only the most important images that need to accompany their papers.
The best possible limit is "must convince the reader to click it".
On the other hand, it made me think of old Usenet posts and discussions. That was another medium where you were limited to plain-text only. Posts were often forced to resort to awful ASCII-art drawings of things they wanted to explain and that was just a horrible experience altogether (not to mention how fun those drawings are to decipher today where modern archives have mostly messed up the white space).
If we can have spam filters for email, we can have ad filters for images.
Streaming video is probably here to stay. /s
Related: why can’t we just point the blind at a protocol optimized for just sharing text documents?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20225291
I exploit this in my Unnamed Gopher Client[0], a client for the predecessor of the Gemini protocol, where I render links in a familiar files/folder format:
https://i.imgur.com/dw3e4Ou.png
And there are many more creative things that can be done with this.
[0]: https://github.com/zenoamaro/unnamed-gopher-client
A website can be rendered at different resolutions, with or without stylesheets, in dark mode, in printer-friendly formats, in a text-like format, with user stylesheets, with some elements hidden, as plain text, etc.
The concept of a user agent that gives the user much greater ability to choose how they want to view content could mean each user will:
* Pick their own font, font size, line spacing, margins
* Pick their own text color and background color. Like dark mode, high contrast, etc.
* Choose how linked images are shown: inline, click to load, load in new window, expandable thumbnails, etc
* How sections, section headers are displayed. Add a table of contents? Add a button to jump to the next section? The user can choose.
I like reader view, which gives me the ability to choose how I view HTML, but only when reader view can figure out how to extract the content (sometimes disastrously missing paragraphs of text...)
However, in my experience, the DOM for some sites is such a mess that trying to apply user preferences is a hack. I.E. reader view accidentally loses text. Does the implementation Opera has always work? That would be cool, although I'd still avoid Opera for privacy reasons.
Gemini seems to be to throw away all that complexity, which makes user customization easier. I.E. the problem is HTML/JS/DOM complexity, not a browser or its extensions.
1. https://www.ilovefreesoftware.com/29/featured/free-website-f...
This thread is the first I've heard, and up until this comment I was thinking in my head, "sheesh, what kind of value proposition would justify that amount of work. I'm just not seeing it."
It's kind of like what REST was meant to be. More about entities than verbs. Cool. I get it now.
Adding images requires more requests and breaks the concept of "one url/document == one request". I love that I know that my client will do nothing I do not tell it to do.
If you want to use gemini and you want inline images I believe https://proxy.vulpes.one does inline images of some form or other.
That said, images have other issues beyond causing page loads/requests to be unpredictable: they are an accessibility nightmare (as we have seen on the web).
Audio is an accessibility nightmare for people who can't see, text is an accessibility nightmare for people who can't see or people who can't read, German is an accessibility nightmare for people who can't speak German.
At some point we have to accept that not every way something is presented is going to be equally accessible by every person, but the solution isn't to just decide we should jettison a rich form of communication because there is a small subset that can't fully benefit from it. Even books that are expected to be used by people who can see all the images usually describe the purpose of the image, what it is illustrating, and why it was included.
By this line of reasoning, you would have to manually approve every init process that your computer would want to start every time you boot it up.
"images" == "client doing things I don't tell it to do" is completely false. Clients have been built that have configurable policies for loading images and scripts, and they're conceptually very simple and easy to use - e.g. "don't load images by default, click to load temporarily, control-click to load and permanently whitelist" is an example of a user-agent policy that not only supports images, but conforms to your extremely convoluted definition of a user-agent "do[ing] nothing I do not tell it to do."
> requires more requests
Is the purpose of a document browser to minimize requests, or to actually serve useful information? Images can encode data that cannot be encoded in text, and a vast quantity of information is much more easily read and understood in graphical form. If you want to minimize requests, then just don't use the web at all.
Also, this isn't even necessarily the case. You could encode images as part of the page, as base64 or something.
> they are an accessibility nightmare (as we have seen on the web)
The web supports alt-text for images. When people don't provide alt-text, that's not a technical problem, that's a social one.
This is solved by HTTP/2 multiplexing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP/2
> breaks the concept of "one url/document == one request"
I don't think anyone cares about this "concept"
Managing image assets is tedious. The web design community still by and large hasn’t figured out a great standard way to do for images (versions with reversible/cherry-pickable diffs) what git does for code.
Instead, diagrams and formulas could follow the lovely ideas of mermaid, graphviz, dot, and mathjax inlined into the markdown as text. Tooling for VSCode handles inline diagrams beautifully for Markdown already.[1]
And then, inline SVG would let you illustrate nearly anything.
WSJ got by fine without photos, as did most journals for most of my lifetime, and Kindle books mostly don’t have them today. I wouldn’t be too quick to say a medium has to be filled with photos.
1. https://github.com/shd101wyy/vscode-markdown-preview-enhance...
If you mean something like Base64 encoded inline images, then those might be viable.
and also
> it misses many features that protocols such as FTP or HTTP use to recover from network instability
What? These statements are at totally different levels of the OSI model.
I think you might have misunderstood the latter, which just refers to the Gopher model having no transfer resume functionality, such as HTTP Ranges, meaning an interrupted transfer must restart.
about network instability: it doesn't refer to congestion and packet loss handling in TCP, but to the "Range" feature of HTTP, which allows downloading only a subset of a file, to resume an interrupted TCP connection.
I mean, for example, if Gemini evolved, it would still somehow be what the web became!
I mean, sure - 404 pages with dry "Oops" or "Not found" messages are way more boring, but I really don't miss getting to see GOATSE or TUB GIRL (don't look up either if you're not familiar with it) every other time I click an outdated link...
There's very little that works if it's development is driven by a community as large and diverse (in terms of sometimes opposing interests and goals) as "the public".
The issue isn't bloated websites as much as the web itself.
Of course you can just disable javascript in your HTTP browser. But as the author states, it's easier to write a completely new client than to disable all the bloat in e.g. firefox.
Screen readers handle Gemini just fine - one of the clients I've tried outputs text and buttons in a GTK window, another literally just outputs text into a terminal and takes command line input, if a screenreader couldn't handle that I'd be horrified. The format is paragraph-based, there's very little styling, no guessing at what the main content on a page is.
I think screen readers can read text pretty well, also, since you've declared that to be a goal for some reason.
It's a waste of time compared to just making something new. That doesn't mean that normal browsers couldn't also get gopher support for those not interested in a lightweight browser.
You cannot do anything lightweight with a browser supporting, and itself being written in, web technologies.
Fragmentation is intentional. Although, nothing stops a web browser from also gaining gemini/gopher support. Just won't be "minimal".
Introducing new technology doesn't change the technology everyone else is using if it doesn’t provide a reason for them to switch. Gemini seems to appeal very much to the issues of a very narrow group of users and, I suspect, an even smaller proportion of content creators. I don't see how it has any effect on the technology everyone else is using.
You could try the same thing with a community dedicated to minimal HTML--heck, you could say that's what HN itself is, almost--but it would have no effective border. You'd keep falling back into the bad old web. This makes the border explicit, instead.
Creating an entirely parallel stack is the only way to obtain minimalism at this point.
Appealing to those liking web technologies would be counter productive, as they're part of the problem being mitigated.
From an individual point of view, there's not much of a difference. If I wanted to migrate my blog to Gemini, it would take very little and it would lose almost nothing. But the second you click a link to another domain you are back in the bloated web.
Once you open a Gemini page, however, you know exactly which experience you are getting. No bloated websites are allowed, so you won't see those at all,ever.
[0]https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/softw...
Building separate protocols for all the various use-cases of the web would be interesting, but would still need some interconnection. But I'm not convinced that has many advantages besides not being accidentally linked to a websited of the "Old web." A problem that could be reduced by a browser extension that strictly blocks any external urls and javascript.
Whilst using Castor, www urls would auto-open in Firefox, and the other way around.
There was a protocol for searching documents, a protocol for looking up someone's email, it was all partitioned out.
The web was seen as just another fish in the pond.
After the web became big, these things still lasted for a while
However spam and crooks changed it all. Usenet became useless, DNS full domain lookups (you used to be able to get a list of all the subdomains of a domain through the command line and you could just browse then out of curiosity), using whois for email (you could just query for a name and get an email address over whois), it's all gone because there's too many snakes trying to scam people and flood the network.
Things used to be much better tools but it turns out they were too good and had no defenses. The dream of everybody connecting has sort of been retracted a bit. RMS, TBL, Torvalds, I could just send them an email in the 90s and they'd respond, it was pretty remarkable.
It's not the case any more. Not even minor players in history (such as an author from a 25 year old book) respond to my questions. People just don't do that anymore.
Spam, harassment, criminals, ill will, this all has to be a big priority if we want to try it again.
The future should be the dreams of our better angels, building better tomorrows...
This is an exceptionally good point. Security is also one of the top problems with the web (alongside the asymmetrical difficulty of hosting content vs consuming it and the lack of consistency for web content). The problems with the web are mitigated by "good enough" solutions from browser vendors, out-of-band third party extensions and even some services on the web itself (e.g. archive.org, though I don't know how sustainable that is, and it's far from perfect).
I don't think this stopped just because of spam, harassment, or other bad behavior. A big part of it is just community size. When the community of internet users was smaller, you could interact with everyone who reached out in a reasonable amount of time. As it got bigger, that is no longer possible because of the sheer number of people.
The author mentions that fancy Gemini reader apps could allow linking to images, since that some terminals allow images to be displayed[1] that would fit nicely too.
Why not just use text based websites and something like w3m? Well it's hard to tell when opening a link in the terminal will be useful and when it would be better to open the link in a "real" browser like Firefox.
e.g. after a git push to github I'm provided with a link to create a PR. I really when I click that link I really want it to open in Firefox.
[1] Off the top of my head Kitty and iTerm2 both allow image display from apps such as the ranger file manager.
JK, interesting read but the idealism is stronggg.
Its probably going to stay as just an idea because other projects have priority.
We already have a transport protocol that "everybody" agrees on: HTTP. We can define a specification for a subset of it, and a subset of HTML/browser features we want, create tools around them, and form a small community.
The advantage here is that the community is not an island. Users of Big Browser can still read your latest rants. They can even learn about this project and, while perhaps not using Mom-and-Pop browser, may support it in their sites, since it wouldn't require another server; mostly just having their site work without JavaScript would be a huge step forward. Right, you don't have Google filtering based on Accessibility. The community can create a search engine that does. Now what? You just get on with your life, producing and consuming AccessibleWeb content without the gratuitous incompatibility.
Sometimes it is just the latest trend...
And if it's that important that EVERYBODY deploys JS to render client side to avoid the refreshes, why isn't this handled at the browser level in the first place (i.e. declare "ExtendDisplayTime"-something on your document and the browser should replace the screen content only AFTER the new page is completely painted).
But at the core of it, the web is a document-display system, and back-hammering and shoe-horning apps that masquerade as documents will always be painful.
For example, i'm thinking of a roam research like content platform, without tracking and ads. It would be interesting to see shared content around that.
While web sites can avoid JavaScript all right, browsing most sites does require JavaScript. As a NoScript user, I'm keenly aware of how many web sites simply do not work without JavaScript.
And I'm not even talking about all the third party spyware.
I encourage every web developer to try running NoScript for a week. You will find it enlightening.
For frequently visited sites you can save which bits you want to allow so its not as onerous as you'd think.
Blocks Google Analytics and Facebook's poison by default.
...or let's just P2P our Emacsens... the last non divisive browser... :-P
The fact that this has attracted a fair number of gopher users (who have always very strongly opposed http/s) would seem proof enough of it's success, imo, at least within particular circles, and at least within the context of its goals. It was never intended to draw people away from the web, it was intended to be a sort of superpowered gopher.
This allows hyperlinking to the accessible version of a page, and using different default browsers for the different protocols, so that I (as someone who wants to use Mom-and-Pop browser) can easily fall back to Big Browser when necessary to view a page that won't render over accs://
What about using something like https://gemini.site.com ?
And part of that restricted spec would allow linking only to such links, to stay within the network ?
And the biggest challenge with Gemini is creating a great search engine. But now , searching site:gemini.* KEYWORD , gives us the power of Google and other search engines.
Doesn't work over time. You link somewhere, the other site owner a month later decides they want to use Google Analytics, now you're linking your readers back to the web they're trying to avoid.
> And the biggest challenge with Gemini is creating a great search engine.
Not really, it's discovery in general, which can be solved in many ways that don't involve search engines; Wikipedia's references are often a good discovery tool, for example. I use aggregators to find Gemini content and follow discussions which are happening across the space.
The entire purpose here is to build a community of people who care about this sort of thing, who write content for that community, where taking your content away from that community is not an easy decision of adding a <script> or <style> tag.
Maybe there's another way?
For example, Gemini could only link through a centralized link management server, and that link server will verify links to be "clean" , and if a link isn't clean it will become dead ?
Of course, that depends whether said link gets most of his traffic from within Gemini or outside.
Hmm...
Have you ever spent any time in small communities? It's lovely to just... not have to care about gaining followers or making arbitrary counters go up or whatever it is people do, and just talk/create for the sake of it. There's no "brand" to care about.
But will that work, and compete with the web for knowledge sharing communities? I'm not sure.
But many users will expect search. And it's really hard to change people's minds.
What if instead of a direct link, there was an intermediary that verified that the source and target of the link conformed to spec? If either side didn't conform, the link would just not work. Ideally the intermediary would be built in to the source's web server for privacy reasons. If the target site decided to quit and break spec, people could still access the site from links posted outside of the network.
The whole point of this project is to shrug off legacy. Yes, that means reinventing a few wheels.
Maybe it would, slightly. But would it make the browser anymore complicated then the unessential features that Firefox has in its default build right now?
Pocket integration, FF Sync, some screenshot function?
The web is so broken that my Firefox even has some Protection Dashboard thing (about:protections). Not that I've ever used or noticed it before.
Why? I actually think it’s pretty clean. You have a one-to-two letter opening tag and an equivalent closing one.
Markdown looks aesthetically nicer and is easier to type, but it’s less precise.
I'm more terrified of the average electron app or java app than I am scared of a single browser tab.
It looks to be a reimagined gopher with some early web parts. Which makes me wonder how close their protocol is to the gopher one.
this means you can create a far simpler protocol semantically: requests are just the uri, responses are just a header of a two digit response code and the mime type, and the rest of the response is just the content as raw text. that's the entire protocol grammar.
This is similar to the driving motivation behind RSS: it was supposed to be something for simple static sites to put up, such that gateways could then poll it, before turning around and doing something more technologically-complex to actually deliver the events, like using WebHooks, or sending emails, or doing whatever PuSH does.
This is like pushing for stone cart wheels when spoked wheels are already available.
For instance, if the issue is with the use of cookies, all they need to implement is a mechanism for the server to not respond to cookies in any form.
If there issue is with other forms of tracking, they could implement a browser which supports a small subset of the HTTP protocol which does not allow any tracking of any kind.
They did. That's the Gemini protocol. I recommend reading the spec to properly understand the constraints they were trying to meet.
> Now, what does Gemini currently have to offer? The best way to find out is to head over to the official site: gemini.circumlunar.space in your Gemini browser.
Gemini protocol could have been a subset of HTTP and the document format could have been a subset of HTML. For instance, if you decide to not implement cookies, javascript etc but if you retain the ability to have formatting for texts, tables, images etc it would have been sufficient.
And even in the case of images, the protocol could have mandated that images cannot be accessed cross-site. The same restrictions could have been placed on other aspects such as the style sheets.
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The problem is that deciding upon a strictly limited subset of HTTP and HTML, slapping a label on it and calling it a day would do almost nothing to create a clearly demarcated space where people can go to consume only that kind of content in only that kind of way. It's impossible to know in advance whether what's on the other side of a https:// URL will be within the subset or outside it. It's very tedious to verify that a website claiming to use only the subset actually does, as many of the features we want to avoid are invisible (but not harmless!) to the user. It's difficult or even impossible to deactivate support for all the unwanted features in mainstream browsers, so if somebody breaks the rules you'll pay the consequences. Writing a dumbed down web browser which gracefully ignores all the unwanted features is much harder than writing a Gemini client from scratch. Even if you did it, you'd have a very difficult time discovering the minuscle fraction of websites it could render.
That misses the fact that people don't want any of that; people just want to continue using the current infrastructure without functionalities that rely on a limited subset of features made available by the current infrastructure.
And that doesn't justify the effort of reinventing the wheel.
I imagine the exclusivity of something like this is part of the appeal. They don't want to be part of the current infrastructure, they don't want to interact with it, or anyone on it.
I'm tempted to creat a new GeoCities and see how that goes for non-technical folks
[0] meaning in the average folk psychology, of course a simpler cleaner web has value, just not to them AFAIB
However Web still has its place in Google, Wiki, and Shopping. The three things has one thing in common in that they need multiple tabs to keep data and Information.
But with a lightweight protocol like this, it seems easy to set up a proxy that would let anyone access the content via web.
- https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/ - https://proxy.vulpes.one/ (also does gopher)
My question is: what's stopping us from doing that?
Please no. No more everything-over-http. There are other ports besides 443; there are other protocols besides HTTP.
The Internet was once a general purpose peer-to-peer network, and we should try to keep it that way.
Big Browser is the cause of so many problems that people on HN complain about. Without the control over Big Browser that certain offending corporations have, their empires are considerably weaker.
Mom-and-Pop Browser is probably not an accurate caricature. Maybe something like End User Browser is more apropos.
If most HTTP is being sent over TLS these days, and Gemini is also over TLS, one could argue there is no "incompatibility". Gemini just doesn't need to all the extra ad-hoc functionality that has been built on top of HTTP. It is intended for data retrieval, not something that relies on help from the 20+ million lines of code in Big Browser to achieve.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23549471