Greetings Geminauts! Last weekend I made a change to the https://gemini.circumlunar.space website setup. Rather than being comprised of static HTML files generated (somewhat inaccurately/unreliably) from the text/gemini originals, the site now uses Drew DeVault's "Kineto" proxy to serve a live and direct mirror of the Gemini version of the site. The new ability of the website to accurately render text/gemini syntax features which aren't also park of Markdown (which is how the original translation was done) allowed me to finally make use of actual Gemini links in the FAQ and other documents, so I did a bit of an overhaul of the FAQ, arguably long overdue. (yes, this change may have slightly reduced readability of the Gopher version of the site, and I do plan to improve that in future) I wanted to draw attention to three things in particular: Firstly, I have removed, for now, the offer of free hosting at gemini.circumlunar.space from the FAQ. This is mostly to spare me the time of dealing with account requests, but also to stimulate the creation of more hosting services and the development of a decentralised Geminispace. I may reinstate hosting in future if I find the time to come up with a more automated signup process. I will still create accounts for people who sent requests before I made this change - sorry for the delay! Secondly, the FAQ now includes detailed instructions on how to submit patches for translations of the documentation into languages other than English. Dutch, German and Porgutuese translations have already been merged into the repo, which I am very happy about and grateful for. With the workflow for translations now established and publicised, I would like to repeat my call for people to volunteer translation efforts into additional languages. Finally, as of quite recently, Kineto now has support for custom CSS to control the appearance of HTTP mirrors of Gemini sites. It should come as no surprise to anybody that I don't have strong skills in this department, nor do I consider the design of the website to be of tremendous importance. But there was discussion on the list in the past about the accessibility issues of the then-current website, and I do take that concern seriously. I'm happy for the site to look pleasant, but my number one priority is that it is easy to read for the widest possible variety of users and on the widest possible variety of devices, screen sizes, etc. I don't think this is worth the time and energy of a big formal design competition/selection process with rules and voting, etc. But if people want to send me proposed new stylesheets sometime in the next, say, two weeks, I will consider them for adoption and will make a unilateral decision at some point based first and foremost on how the design is rated by various automated accessibility scoring tools and by how it performs on the widest variety of devices I can manage to test it on. Just save https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.gmi to a static file, edit the in-line CSS and send me the result. Please don't submit any designs which pull in external resources, and please do not use browser-specific CSS hacks. All else being equal I will strongly prefer shorter and simpler stylesheets using only basic CSS properties. Cheers, Solderpunk
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