💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 000611.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 02:27:04. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

<-- back to the mailing list

Cognitive aspects of navigation in gemini space

Michael Lazar lazar.michael22 at gmail.com

Thu May 14 18:50:11 BST 2020

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ```

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 11:56 AM Luke Emmet <luke.emmet at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a simple and gemini-friendly way for us to (optionally!) convey
> this sense of place. For example, to set a simple global favicon or
> background colour for pages on a certain site. It could help with user's
> task of navigation and understanding exactly where they are. I know
> there are lots of CLI junkies around here, so maybe this hasn't been a
> priority so far.
>
> I'm not proposing anything heavy or like the www, but I feel there could
> be some simple sweet spot here to be investigated.

Hi!

I really appreciate that you brought up favicons. I've also been thinkingabout how they might be a fun and useful way to give a bit of "personality"to sites as they appear in bookmark lists, etc.

The original implementation of favicons on the web was so simple and nice.Just plop a favicon.ico file in your root of your directory and you'redone! Now on the modern web, it's gotten complicated with every browserhaving their own conventions on what the optimized size/format should be.So you end up needing to use a tool to generate 8 different file formatsand link to them to using various <meta> tags in the page header.

I think utilizing unicode characters, specifically emojis, might be anelegant solution to this problem. They're scalable to any resolution andstandard enough to provide a uniform experience across sites. A contentauthor wouldn't need to worry about their image being transparent orlooking like crap on higher resolutions, for example. And of course, theywould work on terminal clients too!

My proposed convention would be something like this

gemini://my-site.com/favicon.txt

This resource should be optional. If it exists, it should contain a singleunicode character (the exact semantics of what a "character" is would needto be ironed out). Clients may chose to display this character alongsidelinks or in the page title bar.

Regards,Michael-------------- next part --------------An HTML attachment was scrubbed...URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20200514/6fa14bb3/attachment.htm>