💾 Archived View for tilde.club › ~astro › gemlog › 2024 › 05-19-2024-Formatting.gmi captured on 2024-05-26 at 14:42:23. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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I'm new to Gemini and was interested in the history how all of this got started. Which landed me to this paper
a complete description of how much the Web is a mess.
One of the things that I'm interested in is words, but not just the words that are printed, but how additional clues can be given to the reader to make it easier to understand. These visual clues are pretty simple. The Lab6 document has some simple examples:
and of course
There is also some formatting that is done
All of these help the author get their point across to the gentle reader. What I feel is amazing that very few of those reading clues have made it into Gemini documents. I was never a fan of the <blink> tag, but I think the line could have been drawn a little farther down the line. Web browsers have become much more complex, the comment that it's hard for someone to build a web browser is spot on. But it's not too much extra legwork to get more display capability than the monks had when they created documents in the 1500's.
Stuffed into a pocket is a device that is more powerful than a 1980's roomful of mainframes. It makes sense to me to grab those CPU cycles and use them to display text that looks like what we can get in dead trees books and magazines. Even the "zine" referenced has pictures and color, but this lowly document is limited to monochrome.
-5/19/2024