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Gemini 🤔 — because Markdown is not radical enough?
The proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Show me the money.
Putting aside the very important protocol-level constraints (the realm of politics), I wonder about the expressive and presentational capabilities of Gemtext and its effects on style and thinking. To take a break from overly rich text & graphics is refreshing. The question is: For what kinds of jobs is this the right tool?
What’s the absolutely sine qua non niche for Gemini? Where can we find the needle in the haystack?
A key issue with the Gemini experience is placelessness. When we visit the website of The Economist, Merriam-Webster, or Twitter, there is never a moment’s doubt where we are. A good website becomes in our minds a distinct and increasingly real place. As we consciously read the content, we pick up, subliminally, the ever-present stylistic cues such as colors, typography, and layout. Deprived of styling, Gemini sites can hardly create, let alone sustain, a sense of place. (ASCII-art site banners and the favicon proposal are both outgrowths of this limitation.) The Gemini reading experience is closer to using an aggregating, homogenizing RSS/Atom feed reader than visiting individual websites. It’s like a Reader View made mandatory rather than reserved only for websites with a nasty personality.
千篇一律，千人一面，人海茫茫，天下一家。
Who should have control over presentation? In print culture, there is no question of that, but with digital communication comes the problem of presentational fidelity, as the client not only receives data but must “render” it. And it’s a continuum: PDF, being designed for print, has a fixed presentation; EPUB is adaptable so as to suit e-book readers, device and human; email is about the message rather than presentation. The design of Gemini leans decidedly towards treating documents as “pure information”. Authors should think seriously about the implications of this loss of control over presentation.
Places to find existing capsules & gemlogs:
Project Gemini FAQ (see question 3.2)
Geminispace listing + search engine
Simple as Gemtext is, apparently you still may want a site generator: