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Luke Emmet luke at marmaladefoo.com
Mon Feb 22 22:40:31 GMT 2021
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On 22-Feb-2021 20:32, Rohan Kumar wrote:
On Mon, Feb 22, 2021 at 09:07:20PM +0100, Hans Gerwitz wrote:
It’s important for users to experience a sense of place as they
navigate (as per Luke Emmet’s “cognitive aspects” thread from May
2020) but also important to give content creators some control over
the presentation of their text.
Already we see extensive use of ASCII art. This is retro-cool but I
would argue favicons or theme colors are actually *more* minimal, and
also more attractive to 21st century users.
I think that the lack of aesthetic branding is one of the best parts
of the Gemini space. Capsules should be distinguished by content, not
appearance. Presentation should be up to the user-agent, not the
authors. If branding is important for a site, then the Web is probably
a better fit for it than Gemini or Gopher.
Hello
This is not an either-or as I see it. We can have both a sense of place to assist navigation and memory AND at the same time avoid server side branding and attempts at aesthetic control.
My investigations in this direction led me to implement auto-theming in the client. The server has to specify nothing, but the client creates an automatic theme based on the site identity derived from the URL. For details see the auto "fabric" theme for GemiNaut client:
gemini://gemini.marmaladefoo.com/geminaut/
To my mind this is sufficient to demonstrate that there is no need for any server controlled colours, fonts, favicons or the like - and at the same time we can build attractive UI experiences for the end user that are content-focussed and can assist the user in finding their way around.
 - Luke