💾 Archived View for midnight.pub › replies › 8120 captured on 2024-08-31 at 14:14:00. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-05-10)
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< Some thoughts about the small web
Hi, ~pandion. It's good that you're thinking through these questions since they are some of the foundational reasons that a small web exists after all.
One thing worth pointing out here is that Gemini exists precisely to satisfy the goals that you laid out here. Via HTTP, there is absolutely no way to know what is on the other side of a web link. You just click it and hope for the best, but the protocol allows the author of that webpage to trigger cascaded downloads, install cookies in your browser, and download untrusted Javascript to run on your computer. There really isn't anything you can do about that except to use a browser without Javascript support, with cookies turned off, and which asks you to confirm each cascaded download. You can use lynx, links, elinks, w3, or eww like that, but typically the browsing experience is almost unusable on most sites. Add on top of that the tremendous amount of CSS styling and "div-itis" used on most sites (not to mention all the React-based sites that are entirely made with Javascript), and there's just no way 99% of the web will render in a text-mode web browser in 2024.
And so this is the reason (as outlined by solderpunk) that Gemini is a separate protocol from the web. Every Gemini link meets these "smallweb" criteria, so you can safely browse around Geminispace all day and never experience any cookies, tracking, Javascript, cascaded downloads, or CSS-styled-into-unreadability pages. And as an improvement over Gopher (which also has these same predictable usability features), you can browse privately and with authentication since all Gemini requests are encrypted via SSL/TLS and client X.509 certificates passed in the TLS handshake provide us a means of persistent authentication, allowing site logins without cookies.
You can certainly make simple, no-frills sites on the web that mimic Gemini-like functionality (minus the client certs), but just remember that whenever you click a link, the rug can (and probably will) be pulled out from under you by whatever is on the other side of it.
Good luck, stay safe, and happy hacking!