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Cognitive aspects of navigation in gemini space

Brian Evans b__m__e at mailfence.com

Sun May 17 18:24:53 BST 2020

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jan6 writes:
> [...] point of gemini is to have a format so simple you don't *need* specialized clients

Funny, I never saw that written anywhere. Simple: yes. Designed specifically to be run without a client that does nothing more that catthe raw format: nope. While that is certainly a valid use case I definitely balk at the idea that that should be a primary target.

> "hey, the user doesn't need to see the source! let's make it all fancy!"

I cannot speak for any other clients, but with mine you can always just download the file as raw source if you want the source.The fact is that there will be variance in use case and client approaches. The use case you mention is perfectly valid, as areprograms (I hesitate to call them clients if all they do is make a request and print the response as raw text) that do what youdescribed. 

I hardly think providing an alt string/type string to what could be a big blob of non-sense characters to a non-sightedperson should be considered too complicated. Nor do I think it is hard to visually grep the following:

Seems unambiguous to me.

[...] without *needing* to do fancy "hide url, only show human-readable part", which is just a nicety fancy clients CAN do...

The spec actually _requires_ that the ``` line itself not be shown to users, thus making a netcat like response not in line with what the specwould consider a client. Taken from the spec:

"Any line whose first three characters are "```" (i.e. three consecutive back ticks with no leading whitespace) are preformatted toggle lines. These lines should NOT be included in the rendered output shown to the user."

I think the alt text feature would be a very useful tool in making gemini more accessible than gopher. The web is an accessibility nightmare and some simple planning and very low overhead features can be implemented here in gemini to make it more approachable to all users, but especially those that use various assistive technologies.

Again, this is a very bikeshed oriented topic and I am not wanting to start a new rabbit hole on this. Solderpunk, if you are reading this, Itoo remember the formatting conversations and do not relish a deep dive back in. So feel free to chime in and pump the breaks on thisconvo if you think that is the right approach.