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by Kelson Vibber, March 4, 2021
After a couple of days messing around with both browsing Gemini Space and building a small capsule based on existing blog posts and pages from my website, here are some more thoughts:
I do like the simplicity of Gemtext, but I think it's *too* simple. At the very least, I would add two things:
The community is building on extensions on by convention: date-formatted links for gemlogs, for instance. And while you could argue that those features aren't necessary in the format if people can find a way to bolt them on, it does seem to speak to gaps in the usefulness of the spec.
I really like Lagrange as a desktop client. I haven't found one I really like on Android yet. Ariane has the bare-minimum of features, but the current version is a bit buggy (the keyboard keeps popping up while I'm scrolling). Deedum seems a bit more stable, but it's kind of awkward.
I'm still reminded of the early web, when everyone involved had their own home pages and everything was low-tech and there was a barrier to entry just to be *on* the web -- because that's part of what it is. It's not just the simplicity of the protocol and the file format, it's that you have to go find a client, find a server, write your own pages, etc. Just like early Mastodon was like early Twitter, and so on, it's not "there are better, kinder people" on here, it's "there are fewer people on here, so there are fewer jerks around. For now."
I'm also reminded of WAP and WML, a protocol and file format intended for early mobile phone browsers. They were extremely stripped-down compared to HTML, had little to no styling as I recall, etc. I think there was a size limit too, which Gemtext doesn't have, but it was similar in that if you want to offer the same content on both protocols (WAP & HTTP, or Gemini & HTTPS), you have to manage two copies of everything.
Yes, two copies. Never mind the lack of images. Even if you have very clean markup (whether it's HTML, Markdown, or some other source format), the fact that Gemtext doesn't allow inline links and HTML encourages them means that you're unlikely to be able to use a single source and build two versions that both fit their media. In a dozen or so blog posts, I found links that were best put between paragraphs, links that were best put at the end of the page, and links that I couldn't really find a good place for if they weren't inline hypertext.
That means that a converter isn't going to produce a first-class experience, in either direction. There will be a lot of cases where there are translation choices to be made. Unless you're willing to limit yourself to the capabilities of Gemtext for your website, and hey, if you're really into Gemini, maybe that's not a problem?
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