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It's flexible enough that you could write a variety of interesting services in it. The primary limitation would be the amount of information you can feed in wit

It's flexible enough that you could write a variety of interesting services in it. The primary limitation would be the amount of information you can feed in with URLs capped at 1024 bytes. Mostly-read-only APIs like fetching maps are still quite practical. With INPUT, REDIRECT, and the mechanism for creating sessions via transient certificates, field-at-a-time forms are possible. You could even build a pretty friendly experience around it, since the server can validate and re-prompt each field as you go. I've been thinking that a text/gemini browser could recognize link lines that end in .png/.gif/.jpeg and offer a button next to them to manually expand the imaages inline. It would be a nice balance between being able to see figures along with the rest of a document without bloating page fetches. Perhaps other data types would have sensible inline interpretations, too- CSV files become inline tables if you expand them, etc. Just a few ideas I'm knocking about.

z3t4 6y ago
Once users get Tbit Internet broadband, web sites will be several GB big, or we would have a chicken vs egg problem.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
I understand the protocol is simple, but there's no reason the client has to be. Taking your example: > CSV files become inline tables if you expand them, etc. Why not only make them inline tables, but make them searchable, pivotable and graphable? Embed a bunch of statistical tooling directly in the interface. It's something I dream would happen on the Web - if Google^H^H^H^H^H^Hweb standard bodies could agree on a new tag for tabular data, say <datatable>, that would - by default - come with aforementioned capabilities, and with enough styling and hooks to lure in the webdevs, then maybe all the tabular data that's on webpages could be finally made explorable in an efficient fashion...
- RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
  I hear you, and I definitely imagined something along those lines eventually wrt. basic analysis tools in-browser. In my mind, the key idea is that instead of inventing a new standard or extending an existing one (a new HTML tag, for example), what we need to do is compose formats which are each individually simple. CSV is far from perfect, but it has an RFC, it's simple, and there are already loads of tools that can work with it. Many times I have wanted to work with data that was displayed in a tabular fashion on a web page, and I have variously used copy-and-paste and manual cleanup or writing a scraper to get it into a workable form. Imagine how much easier my life could have been if those tables simply were CSV files that my browser happened to display nicely, and I could have fetched them directly at any time! A format like text/gemini is an opportunity to start from scratch with this kind of compositional thinking in mind. Smart browsers could do all sorts of convenient things, but even "dumb" browsers and scripts benefit from having data and content in accessible formats.

z3t4 6y ago

Once users get Tbit Internet broadband, web sites will be several GB big, or we would have a chicken vs egg problem.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

I understand the protocol is simple, but there's no reason the client has to be. Taking your example: > CSV files become inline tables if you expand them, etc. Why not only make them inline tables, but make them searchable, pivotable and graphable? Embed a bunch of statistical tooling directly in the interface. It's something I dream would happen on the Web - if Google^H^H^H^H^H^Hweb standard bodies could agree on a new tag for tabular data, say <datatable>, that would - by default - come with aforementioned capabilities, and with enough styling and hooks to lure in the webdevs, then maybe all the tabular data that's on webpages could be finally made explorable in an efficient fashion...

RodgerTheGreat 6y ago
I hear you, and I definitely imagined something along those lines eventually wrt. basic analysis tools in-browser. In my mind, the key idea is that instead of inventing a new standard or extending an existing one (a new HTML tag, for example), what we need to do is compose formats which are each individually simple. CSV is far from perfect, but it has an RFC, it's simple, and there are already loads of tools that can work with it. Many times I have wanted to work with data that was displayed in a tabular fashion on a web page, and I have variously used copy-and-paste and manual cleanup or writing a scraper to get it into a workable form. Imagine how much easier my life could have been if those tables simply were CSV files that my browser happened to display nicely, and I could have fetched them directly at any time! A format like text/gemini is an opportunity to start from scratch with this kind of compositional thinking in mind. Smart browsers could do all sorts of convenient things, but even "dumb" browsers and scripts benefit from having data and content in accessible formats.