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Will we ever see ansi animations over the Gemini protocol? I think of astrobotany with plants moving. Anything exist like that already?
1 year ago · 👍 swan
No, there isn't an agreement that ansi colours are a good idea in gemtext. They are a very specific UI technology - like embedding <font> tags or RTF in your gemtext and expecting it to be rendered correctly. As for whatever media type you want to serve over Gemini, that is completely open so if there is a media type for ansi animations, you can use that. · 1 year ago
Cool. Yeah that makes sense to keep it simple. I like the ansi colors that are currently in use, even though it could be argued to be feature creep, and also the opposite could be argued.
looks like these discussions have been going on already:
gemini://skyjake.fi/gemlog/2021-11_ansi-sgr.gmi
gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~stack/gemlog/2022-01-26.ansi.gmi
gemini://gemini.ctrl-c.club/~stack/gemlog/2021-11-29.ansi.gmi
I like @skyjake’s thoughts, and it seems like the community somewhat agrees that colors, in most situations, used sparingly are ok. I like that, and I can see that doing ansi animations could become a mess. and make client development more difficult. · 1 year ago
@smokey I agree. Technically it seems feasible... but I'd rather see simple, widely accessible and compatible ways to tackle this problem. Sending over a GIF or video link seems a bit more in the spirit of Gemini than relying on terminal behavior that isn't at all a part of the spec.
I think something like a publicly accessible SSH server (or even just a netcat-able socket) might be a better way to convey that sort of ANSI animation, if one's really set on it. E.g., Astrobotany could provide an SSH link, a telnet link, or even just instructions, for connecting to an unathenticated endpoint where one may see one's plant moving in the wind, ANSI-style. · 1 year ago
I like that gemini specs seems to have the unix philosophy of "do one thing and do it well" which in this case is basic text transmission. If You want to share a gif or video or picture, create a link to it and trust the end user to download it locally if they want to see it. Im no developer, however it would seem that support for dynamic ANSI animations would add a level of complexity and increased data usage higher than the gemini specs were originally intended to handle. Keep the dynamic moving stuff seperate from the static text protocol. · 1 year ago
Give me <marquee> or give me death · 1 year ago
if we could see animations can i have client settings to not show them:-) if we is here in gemini we probably don't want the useless eye candy that we left behind in html for:D · 1 year ago
Some terminal based clients might be able to do it already, if they allow ANSI escapes to control cursor positioning and screen clearing.
It's unlikely this level of emulation is ever implemented in GUI clients, as they don't use a cursor-based drawing method. · 1 year ago
@gnuserland not sure if it is a good idea, but I would be impressed if I did see it. It could be fun to see a short animation of preformatted text when a page loads. Imagine the station logo with an animated shooting star just after the page loads. It would be neat. That said, the Gemini spec doesn’t say anything about ansi at all, so I was curious if anyone entertained the idea already. · 1 year ago
You sure to want it? 🤨 · 1 year ago