I was hanging out on the #gemini channel on `irc.tilde.chat` and people noticed that Hacker News was talking about Gemini, and this got posted in a thread about a toffelblog post, A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternative to the web.
A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternative to the web
lukee: another juicy quote from HN to entertain you “In a way Gemini could have been published by writer of European Union, North Korea or Soviet Union laws, I can’t belive this is a US products, as it contains too much to liberty constrain 😉 “
There’s more in that Hacker News thread. I don’t know what to say. How do you respond to somebody who says that there is something in common between the European Union, North Korea, the Soviet Union, and the Gemini protocol? It’s a waste of time. So how about something different... How about imagining this being a good response! How could we rephrase it and have an interesting conversation?
more in that Hacker News thread
How about translating it into “Why is minimalism a thing? Why does it have to be mandated? Minimalism in the web has meaning because you can do otherwise. Brutalism in architecture because you could be hiding it all. The decision to show that concrete only has meaning because you could be hiding it. To *mandate* minimalism is simply to mandate poverty. It has no meaning.”
So, let’s imagine that; let’s reply to this imagined intelligent challenge, and hope for a good conversation.
I think the first question would be: who does the choosing? In a world where we all use the web, some authors can choose to use minimalism in web design: little CSS, simple HTML, no Javascript, no content from other domains, a focus on documents instead of imagining the web as a generic interface to all applications. It’s possible to do. The choice lies with the web author.
The choice does not lie with the reader, though! The reader who tries to surf the web with text browsers such as `w3m`, `lynx`, or `eww`, or with very limited browsers such as `dillo`, soon runs into problems. Sometimes the text itself can be read, but interaction is difficult. Headers and footers are often terrible. The list of links at the top of pages is terribly long and messy. It’s hard to find the text of a tweet if you visit the URL on Twitter. There’s too much garbage on that page! It’s also hard to find the beginning of that README if you visit a project’s page on GitHub. So many links!
The choice also does not lie with developers, surprisingly. The developer who tries to create a different browser, the developer who tries to extend HTML, the developer who tries to extend Javascript, all developers on the web soon realise that everything is fucking *huge*. The code base for Firefox is huge. The code base for Chromium is huge. The number of web standards is huge. The Javascript APIs are huge. The number of open issues in the bug trackers is huge. The Mozilla Developer Network (MDN) wiki is huge. Even the processes one has to follow to propose new things are huge. The hoops one has to jump through to propose new Emojis for Unicode.
And how much weight there is to all these things. How much business, money, capital, investments, jobs. Unicode is going to be forever and ever as long as we use text, I think. All those stupid pictures of technology that we no longer use are going to stay with us for the next ten thousand years. It boggles the mind.
Therefore, individual developers effectively have no choice. The number of people and the amount of capital required to create a new fully-featured web browser is unimaginable.
That’s why people like @alcinnz working on the Odysseus browser have very specific opinions on what to implement and what to drop.
That is why Gemini matters. Gemini allows many developers to write clients and servers. It gives users back choice.
I’d love to read your take on it.
Here’s what I’ve found so far:
@solderpunk wrote Why not just use a subset of HTTP and HTML?
Why not just use a subset of HTTP and HTML?
“… to create a clearly demarcated space where people can go to consume *only* that kind of content in *only* that kind of way, which is what I think we really want.”
#Philosophy #Web #Gemini