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Midnight Pub

Still here

~gerwitz

I got annoyed at the Gemini crowd because they don’t see any value in giving authors the chance to even specify a SINGLE COLOR, much less allow for inline images of any sort. The idea that even content meant to be read can be reduced to simple text saddens me almost as much as the use of video.

But, still, the world needs a new web that lacks the “features” that have turned the WWW into an app hosting platform. So I’m glad to see this is still going, and will somewhat-begrudgingly commit to Gemtext as a publishing target.

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~tracker wrote:

Hi ~gerwitz. Glad to hear you are giving Geminispace another go. I largely agree with ~ew's sentiments, but I'll also add that you can always include links to images in your Gemtext posts. If you view them in Lagrange, you can actually expand those images inline as you have requested.

~morgan wrote:

Hi, glad to read you're giving it a(nother) try.

I love the lack of styling in Gemtext, it means I can read ten or twenty independent pages without a single jarring style change ... on the web the only way to get that consistency is walled gardens.

~ew wrote:

Hey ~gerwitz!

You are still waiting for your chance to pimp up gemtext, do you?

~bartender? Some more of that home made lemonade, please! Thanks!

WELLLL, since you kind of asked. I am one of those who prefer monospaced font (jetbrains mono semibold) everywhere on screen, unless it's a LaTeX typeset pdf with serif fonts. I am grateful that emacs/elpher can display gemini content in monospaced font. Why? Because it is much more readable to my eyes/brain/pattern recognition chain. And the same argument goes for colors. I cannot discern dark blue on black background, or middle grey letters on light gray background. I might even think "Oh, this looks nice!", but three paragraphs in, my eyes hurt. Sorry. It does not help that I have recently developed an extra problem on one eye. So, low contrast in color, thin or sans serif or oblique fonts, no matter how tastefully arranged, are a burden on my eyesight. So content should be content, and presentation should be entirely under my control, in my not so humble opinion. Gemtext achieves that.

The other thing is this: gemtext is so simple, that I can memorize the few character groups to indicate a headline, quote, link. I have given up on html (or xml for that matter) really quick. I keep everything that I might want to read again, either in plain text, or (you guessed it) in LaTeX, if it needs to look more pretty. However, you can serve .pdf and other formats very simply via gemini:// ... so I don't buy into "gemini/gemtext is not expressive enough". It is. It is just not made to copy the big web in any way --- at least this is how I like to see it.

Cheers!