💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › replies › 750 captured on 2023-07-10 at 14:19:42. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I unsubscribed a while ago. I'd rather be happy than be on there.
I like images. I'm an artist. The first thing I put up on my own capsule was a list of images I've made.
Regarding inline images I remember with some trepidation how the early web was broken by 1Ă—1 spacer gifs, by emulating fonts by way of image (as an example of this, see Paul Graham's or Scott McCloud's websites which are both from this era and are still set up that way), and by huge site-replacing images.
That was pretty awful.
I also remember books where all the images were in a special section in the middle. You had to flip back and forth. That wasn't too bad.
Maybe it's fine to visit the illustrations via link. Maybe that can be OK. With Lagrange you can even optionally, on the client side, choose to load them in one at a time. Maybe it's OK that the format only does semantics and doesn't do presentation.
I sometimes liken the appeal to an SMS or a chat message. It's nice that the person I'm talking to isn't trying to select fonts, colors and such. It's nice that we're just writing to each other and that that's the focus.
Oh, you give me fond memories of hand-coding, byte-by-byte, the smallest possible “null.gif”. That was a different web. Which had already gone too far, one might say!
I am very sympathetic to the minimalism drive. Let us never let Gemini servers specify fonts. Or even more than one color. ;-) But if we can’t display a gallery of more than one image on a “page”, then why support rendering images at all? Just go for an ncurses UI.
I’m having more flashbacks, now, to when the Macintosh happened and so many nerds insisted that real computers didn’t waste their power on bitmapped displays. I was one of those nerds. (Apple // forever! Telnet is the only internet protocol we’ll ever need!)