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And I’m gonna reply more to the quote than to anything Alex wrote, not that I disagree with Alex but just that I had another take.
So it’s borderline useless for all but the simplest use cases, and even there it does a very subpar job. I’d like to have an inline image every now and then, or organize things in some multi-column layouts or the like, or a table. 19th century newspapers could do this, and if your technology can’t emulate typography produced on a daily basis — often in a hurry — 150 years ago then your tech is rather limited. These protocols keep shooting themselves in the head with stuff like this, not even in the foot because this entire thing is dead on arrival for all but a few niche tech folk.
Columns, layouts and the like is something a client can do.
Using the 150 yo analogy, Gemini is the typewriter, the client the typesetter.
The web can’t even settle on darkmode vs day mode (and each server tries to set it server-side), let alone things like fontsize, contrast, margins, line lengths etc. (Update: OK, the darkmode thing is solved by @media (prefers-color-scheme: dark). So that’s a bad example.)
Reading web pages on a modern browser is like reading a ransom note, all cut & pasted from various magazines.
Gemini finally solved the semantic vs presentation problem.
No people, no smiling fakery. Just a beautiful, big wall of ice-cold text. The slogan underneath: It’s the real thing. Period. Gemini. Period. In Helvetica. Period. Any questions? Of course not. Read Gemini. Period. Simple.
Reading the discussion on lobste.rs now, I see that Drew already makes the same points I wanted to make. I didn’t mean to make fun.
And I also see that this discussion is two months old.
But Gemini text finally solving the semantics issues is genuinely making me excited for it again.♥
Arguably Twitter had the same “uselessness” when it first showed up, with limitations on chars, markup and even images (people posted links to images). And those limitations ended up making the data itself, the posts themselves, more accessible and readable in many ways.
I never had an account on there (indie forever), but limitations can be good.
I’ve spoken before on the value of limitations on protocols especially. I’m OK with systems being complex, separately; a server that generates the pages via some complex database hookup, a client that renders the pages with some advanced hyphenation TeX implementation... but where systems meet, that’s the touchpoint where things need to be simple. What we owe each other, what we ask of each other, that needs to be simple.
Oltre a concordare su quello che c’è scritto lì, c’è un altro punto che è un po’ da “guardo il dito, guardo la luna”
♥