💾 Archived View for drawk.cab › glog.gmi captured on 2020-11-07 at 00:36:20. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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This is a glog. I probably won't revise things as I go along. New stuff at the top.
There's a strong sense of place on Gemini, like there was on the 90s web.
Welcome traveller. Park up your Gemini capsule, rest your legs, roast a marshmallow, and chill out.
this has 2 aspects
gemini occupies two adjacent niches: a protocol, and a hypertext markup language (yes, but that is exactly what gemtext is.) And both are well in the running for simplest usable thing in those niches. To dismiss gemini on the grounds that there are more featureful or more useful things in the same niches is just to deny that there is value or beauty in the simplicity for its own sake. Gemini-the-protocol takes what we've learned about hypertext protocols and pares it back. It's got status codes (HTTP/0.9 didn't) but it doesn't have caching or keep-alive or lots of other features, because the (not always) unspoken pact is that gemini will never be big, and so will never need these complicating features.
on the markup language: it is good. I don't miss ordered lists or bold or italic. If I can't emphasize something using rhetoric, it isn't worth emphasizing using pixels. I hope it doesn't get extended very much. The journey of HTML is kind of interesting in that over the years it's managed to move away from batshit random (oh, also SGML) to something which is actually pretty coherent and fit for purpose. You can reject the purpose, but imo you can't deny that HTML5 is the best HTML yet. Gemini just, doesn't need to be in that race.
on the protocol: gemini is part of a "roll your own" culture and it's appealing to be able to say that it can be completely implemented in 100 lines of code. It goes with the overall feeling of transparency. However, the rest of the stack is still hugely complex. Is a 100-line program that begins
import ssl, sockets
really simpler than a 50-line program that begins
import requests
and this takes us to the second aspect
By not using HTTP, gemini forces users to rethink their side of things. Their favourite browser doesn't get the scheme, so there is a small barrier to entry. But it's an equitable barrier, as much as such a thing is possible. The need for a new client provides the leverage to mandate a new markup language as default. (There's nothing stopping me from serving HTML over Gemini, except the wrath of the community.)
On the flip side, a URL scheme defines a distinct space in a clear way. All links, even to other hosts, will either conform to Gemini practice, or they'll have a different scheme, and thereby alert the user that they are entering somewhere else. Contrast this with some other options, like, domain name conventions (too easy to break) or serving gemini files over HTTP (you don't know what type you'll actually get until you've followed the link.)
Is the URL scheme in fact more important than the protocol for defining a space? It's arguable. Imagine I invented the Capricorn protocol, which is actually HTTP, except
Would this actually be any different in a practical sense? If you were in the know, you'd be able to access capricorn servers at http://whatever:1977/ and get back whatever they were serving, which browsers would probably just render as text. Is that the worst outcome?
Again this absolutely does not stop Gemini from being a valuable contribution in the as-simple-as-feasible space, I just want to unravel the thinking a little.
You might have noticed I didn't mention Gopher. Gopher is cranky and just as bad as the mid-90s Web, in terms of being a sane thing to want to use in the 2020s. Few people are running HTTP/0.9 servers for kicks. There's more to it than that.
Gemini likes these things from recent times:
It likes some aspects of these things:
But it doesn't like these other things:
These are the official properties of Gemini:
I couldn't believe it, and it inspired me to make something of my own: my own space.
- salejandro
As I continue my journey in life of becoming ever more obscure, I eventually find myself in Gemspace
- kwicien