Hello gemini people.
My first time here so I thought it would be appropriate to send
a message.
I have discovered gemini thanks to unicorn. I have been reading
some articles about it, explored clients, visited sites...
Loved the ssh kiosk by the way.
And fell in love with bombadillo, both the client and the name.
I don't know if I could browse the mailing history so as not
to ask redundant questions, but as I don't know such search
feature, here I go. Please correct me otherwise and feel free
to teach/guide me.
I am no developer, so let me ask a few naive questions. Not with
the intention of being critic with it. I love the idea for what
I have learned. So sometimes it will seem criticism, but in
fact it will be ignorance on my behalf.
1) I agree that browsers are a nightmare, and I am worried that
Mozilla falls or shrinks and firefox with it. They are having
some financial troubles, I am told. So the idea of a beginning
from scratch is GREAT.
2) I love simplicity, and plain text (and vim). So I find
that making the effort to retain such simplicity is worth
and not easy, since the easy is to ask for more and more.
I find minimalism great, and also hard. It requires
constant self-reminding of why is so important. At least
I require such reminders.
3) I am a mathematical physicist and use a lot of equations
and data visualization. As a scientist, how can I use gemini?
For equations, I usually use MathJax. Talk about bloating!!!
It is great but it is huge. There are alternatives, but none
is near close to a plain text solution. We also have a set
of utilities like tex2mail, which converts LaTeX into ascii
or unicode art, but... it is really ugly and inconvenient.
We could just use raw LaTeX code, which for some expressions
would be fine:
\frac{a+b}{x^2+x-2}
or
(x+y^2)^n
but what about a matrix or a more involved code?
Is this up to us or is there a way to integrate this without
adding excessive complication?
What about data? The only thing that comes to me now is to
use Python's Sympy, which can render LaTeX equations in
ascii and also data graphics.
4) What about musicians, or artists? I am not talking about
music score, which even in html has never been offered a nice
solution (that I know of). But audio? Is it possible to
have audio? I mean, no need for the browser to play it, but
to link it? And what about artistic expression? As much as
I love plain text and black and white, many Sapiens consider
design and style a very important thing. Will these communities
feel excluded from gemini because of extreme (I like extreme)
simplicity? I am sure I still have a lot to learn here.
Sometimes I use ncurses just to have some nice colors in my
terminal. My question here is: is the style and design of
the page enforced by the protocol, the client or the page
itself? IMHO a plain text browser in which each page could
define background and text color would be really awesome.
5) I love design and colors, but most of all I love content,
and I think that gemini is a refocus on content. And I love
it, with or without colors, with or without math. But my dream?
A minimalistic browsing with page-defined colors and with
some easiness to integrate math and graphics with plain text.
Thanks for all the work. I will keep learning from you.
And I will also write less words next time (`:
fluxion
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