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Luke Emmet luke.emmet at gmail.com
Fri May 29 00:24:31 BST 2020
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On 28-May-2020 16:29, solderpunk wrote:
Thanks a lot for sharing this! Even as a "terminal junkie" myself I am
really happy to see more "user friendly" clients appear, especially for
more mainstream platforms.
I think this will be important that there are clients out there for everyone.
I am very excited to see that people are starting to explore the
possibilities for client-driven styling of Geminispace. Slight
differences in appearance for different domains, and also for links
into/out of Geminispace are both excellent ideas. I'm curious about the
blue and white geomeric icon shown in your screenshot for the "fabric"
theme. Is that randomly generated based on the hostname? Is it the
result of a failed favicon request, or is it always there in that theme?This is a site-specific "placemarker" automatically generated for that site. It is the equivalent of a site logo, or something like that. Perhaps I might implement putting any favicon there if it exists. Each site has a different background "fabric" and placemarker. Together these elements help dramatically in my experience in finding your way around. You can click a link and recognise you have arrived at a familiar place.
The site placemarker is an active element. It will take you to the the home page for the site or user.
My concept of a site is that it is either the domain itself, or if there is a user specified in the path, then it is the user home.
gemini://domain1.tld/mypath.gmi -
site is domain1.tld for that page
gemini://domain2.tld/users/foo/bar/baz.gmi -
site is domain/users/foo for that page
This gives a nice overall approach that each user gets a singular theme applied to all their content, but there can be many users on a domain.
Something no client has done yet, as far as I know, which I think would
be great is to make use of the different levels of heading which are
possible in text/gemini to automatically generate a "table of contents"
for a long document which could be displayed in a side-panel, and allow
immediate jumping to a particular location. A lot of PDF viewers have
something like this. This was just as big a motivation for my decision
to include those headers in the spec as that they look nice. My hope is
that with good clients it ends up being extremely easy to make
geminisites which are very quick and easy to navigate or, at the very
least, requires a concerted effort to make one which is hard to
navigate.Ah yes - it was already on my todo list, and I knew it wasnt going to be hard. I'm assuming you mean something like this :-)
https://www.marmaladefoo.com/vanilla/marmaladefoo/uploads/geminaut/geminaut_toc.png
I just now uploaded a new 0.8.3 version that has this implemented:
https://www.marmaladefoo.com/pages/geminaut
I would also like to see - and this is just my personal preference,
which I hope people agree with but which I can't force anybody to share
- better support in clients for bookmarking and for handling Atom/RSS
feeds. The mainstream web experience has tended towards people having
their browsing directed for them, by things popping up on feeds hosted
by (a small number of) other people. There's obviously some value in
this for content discovery and discussion, but I think it would also be
nice if, along with the technical changes at a protocol level to
discourage tracking, reduce software and hardware requirements, and
generally remove bloat and clutter, Gemini could also be a vehicle for
a "cultural change" toward (among other things!) more self-directed and
self-paced reading.
I agree there are a set of cultural practices and expectations that we can try to shape with Gemini as a way of using the Internet. Finding the sweet spot is always a challenge, but I think there is good evidence of the general direction of our collective travel.
But we'll see how that goes.
Anyway, this looks like a great project with really interesting plans.
Please keep us informed!
Thanks!
- Luke