💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 001200.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 02:02:39. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Martin Keegan martin at no.ucant.org
Sat May 30 15:55:45 BST 2020
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On Sat, 30 May 2020, Petite Abeille wrote:
Perhaps some sort of informal convention, ala shebang [1], as a prelude to a text/gemini, with a few directives, such as:
#!♊︎ ⌂(uʍopǝpısdn ☣︎) ⾊(black white)
This stuff surely is already doable with HTML on the normal web.
There's an ornateness spectrum, from very intricate, complex and decorated to very minimal and austere. On the one hand we have Catholic and Orthodox churches, subway graffiti, NHS GP waiting room notice boards, Geocities, Myspace, etc, and on the other we have Quaker meeting houses, Danshari, Wikipedia, medium.com, suckless.org, etc. The existing HTML-based web caters very well to the ornate end of the spectrum. text/gemini as originally conceived caters well to the minimal end.
In the present circumstances, familiarity and the lure of popularity will generally create a pressure to move away from the minimal end of this spectrum, leaving the demand it satisfied once again uncatered to. It is a huge shame that people who just want to write, and people who just want to read, must, if they want to communicate over the web, contend with vast amounts of complexity thrown in their way by advertisers and designers. Moving to duplicate the web will just fragment Gemini as the "just want to write and read" crowd evict themselves to a different text file format.
Mk