đŸ Archived View for nytpu.com âș gemlog âș 2021-02-14.gmi captured on 2021-12-03 at 14:04:38. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Despite the marketing of Gemini as:
You may think of Gemini as "the web, stripped right back to its essence" or as "Gopher, souped up and modernised a little", depending upon your perspective.
If you know about Geminiâs early developmentá” then you know that Gemini evolved from /Gopher/, not from HTTP! As such, Gemini attempts to capture Gopher-era sentiments about the web. Gopher is absolutely not a âdo everythingâ protocol, it can serve like 8 types of media and text files. It was designed with how the internet at that time was designed, you have separate, specific protocols to do things. Want a forum? NNTPá” is the choice for you! Send some emails? POP/IMAP/SMTPᶠare the protocol suites for you! Want to streamá” something? Use RTSP (negotiation), RTP (content streaming), and RTCP (stream controls)! Realtime chat? IRC of course! Want to have a hyperlinked menu of resources in a variety of formats? /Then/, and only then, you should use Gopherá”. Gemini is also meant to fit into that latter segment (while still /not/ replacing Gopher!). Gemini is not meant to be used for everything, itâs meant to be a cleaner and more modern way to deliver text content, while allowing linking to other resources. Thanks to the wonder of URIs, you can link to any other source you want on any protocol! Everyone seems to approach Gemini from the âstripped downâ web perspective, but they miss out on all the ideology that comes behind Gophers and Geminiâs founders (who are Gophers, and therefore adopted those ideas).
This isnât to say that experiments like forums on Gemini are bad, and in fact creativity like that is essential to Gemini IMO. What I mean to say is that Gemini should take on everything that it can, but shouldnât be tailored to anything other than the main goal of serving static text files that /happen/ to have links. A full-fledged text adventure in Geminiᶠis an amazing thing, but that doesnât mean we need to turn it into a Z-Machineá” protocol. Why should we change it to accommodate an image galleryÊ° just so you can make an Instagramâą cloneâ±? Gemini is /very/ good at what it does (superior to Gopher IMO), and it requires some creativity to make it do anything else.
[b]: otherwise known as usenet
[c]: notice how even for one thing you still have multiple protocols. they do similar things (transfer emails from one place to another), but theyâre still different enough to justify having separate protocols for each.
[d]: hope you have t1. maybe itâd be better to have your friend just bring the tape over.
[e]: just a simple observation, but notice how all of these protocols listed focus on transferring pure content, and they let the end user agent choose how to display it. http is one of the few protocols that gives the sender inordinate control over its presentation to the viewer. probably a coincidence, but i wouldnât be surprised if it turned out not to be.
[f]: the site seems to be broken but the source code is still good.
[h]: lack of inline media is surprisingly enough the most common, universal complaint about gemini. i host my images on my gemini capsule perfectly fine, and i even rewrite them to be inline in my gmiâhtml converter for my website, but with a good browser like lagrange you can still view images inline without making a bunch of unauthorized requests. also, iâm pretty sure people lived without inline images for a very long time, even when printing plates for images came about you would only use them when absolutely necessary because youâd need to hire an engraver, then have to specially go through after printing the type and print the image, a lot of extra work and expense.
[i]: idea: activitypub but itâs an actual protocol instead of some shitty http layer, and you can then make non-web activitypub clients, have leaner and customized requests, etc.
Now, just because Iâm addressing misconceptions with Gemini, itâs amazing how many people donât bother to read the FAQ despite the fact that thatâs almost always whatâs linked when itâs submitted some place. âWhy doesnât it have inline imagesâ they ask while ignoring the very clear statement saying that the user should always know when a request is being made. They also donât bother to look at one of the most popular Gemini clients, Lagrange, which has the ability to display media inline (upon clicking a link, not automatically). I too believe that having to navigate to a new page to view media, then navigating back is an undesirable pattern, but I believe that having dozens of unknowable web requests on page load is not desirable either. The second biggest complaint is that you canât control the styling of the site, but that almost invariably comes from web devs and I wouldnât expect them to understand why the user should have control any more than I would expect salmonella to understand why humans cook food before eating itÊČ.
[j]: in case you canât tell i donât really hold web devs in high regard
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