💾 Archived View for park-city.club › ~invis › phlog › 025-re-mercury-protocol.txt captured on 2023-06-16 at 16:18:41.
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# Re: Mercury Protocol This is a response to solderpunk's new "cornedbeef" post: => gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/cornedbeef/the-mercury-protocol.gmi In a vacuum, I wouldn't be against this idea. It's nice, simple, clean. It's like Gopher, but better. No weird gophermap syntax, no mixing up 0 and 1-types, just nice, simple, clean text. The thing is, though, Gopher already exists, and it seems to be doing fine. It has its shortcomings, yes, but the community is there and active. IMO, convincing people to move to Mercury over Gopher is a *lot* harder of a sell than convincing people to move to Gemini. It's kind of the same problem with chat protocols. IRC is fine for a lot of people. It wasn't until Discord came around that people really started leaving IRC in droves, because Discord was a substansial improvement over the IRC experience with centralized logging, painless "server" setup, emotes, image uploading, etc. etc. And now, nothing is going to replace Discord until it can fit Discord's role *but better*. Mercury is a Gopher replacement. It's not an alternative, it's not a "halfway between Gopher and HTTP" thing. It serves exactly the same role as Gopher, except it uses mostly Gemini document syntax. On the otherhand, Gemini is *more* than that. I know the client certificate stuff is a bit of a pain, but I think it allows for a *lot* of untapped potential. Maybe there could be a Gemini- based RSS reader that uses certs to keep track of who's reading what. Imagine CAPCOM, but with an optional unread message counter. That's neat. I get that the point of Gopher/Gemini is to just have a simple way to deliver text. That's fine. This is just my personal thoughts, but I do think that even Gemini is just "gopher but better". Gemini has a little more going for it, but there's lots of things about even 90's era HTML that I like. My preferred new doc format would be something like HTML 3.2 but with CSS as first-class, flex- box, CSS grid, etc. sort of layout, and a very strong emphasis on readability and semantics. I like seeing people get creative with layouts, so long as I can turn them off or override them with my own. Dare I say it, I even like inline images and links. Gasp. Snark aside, Gemini interests me because it has the potential to be *more* than just Gopher but better. That's the bit I'm interested in. Gopher already exists. Let it be, I'd say. Let Gemini blossom into whatever it wants to be. I like that text/gemini is fancy plain text. It's a very, very nice property. I would not be opposed to adding a *few* more line types, still completely optional, but in a way that progressively enhances a page. I *love* the fact that text/gemini is *always* readable in a terminal or from the source, in a way that very accurately reflects what you will see in the browser. I want to see where this goes. If Mercury *does* become a thing, I guess it wouldn't be that hard to throw it in Twin Peaks (my Gemini browser). I'd basically just be copy/pasting the Gemini code and throwing out some stuff. Any existing Gemini server could just dual- serve Mercury as well, just the exact same documents. But I doubt anyone would take any special care to make Mercury-only content, or a Mercury browser that isn't just bolted onto something else. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Let's see what happens, I guess.