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A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternative to the web

• msla 6y ago
  I guess I don't understand this: How is a network protocol proof against being used to transport CSS files? Does the network stack inspect what you're shipping and ensure you're only sending 100% Pure Plain Text? > The Gemini transport protocol is unsuitable for the transfer of large files, since it misses many features that protocols such as FTP or HTTP use to recover from network instability. Isn't that TCP's job? Is this person saying Gemini doesn't use TCP? Finally: > Now, what does Gemini currently have to offer? The best way to find out is to head over to the official site: gemini.circumlunar.space in your Gemini browser. Back in the Gopher days, my "Gemini browser" would be my Web browser. That was one of the reasons Web browsers took off: You could use them to access all of the information on the Internet, including the WWW, Gopher, Usenet, and Email. Only more recently did Mozilla morph from the Netscape Communicator software suite into the slimmed-down Firefox browser without email, spinning off Thunderbird in the process, and only much later did Firefox drop Gopher support from the core binary.
  • zuppy 6y ago
    > Isn't that TCP's job? Is this person saying Gemini doesn't use TCP? maybe he’s talking about higher level features, like the possibility to restart a download from a certain point, without redownloading the initial part? haven’t used this since dialup days, though
    • ivanstojic 6y ago
      I suspect that it is this partial download that they are talking about. That said, I can't tell whether or not I've used it recently. I know I don't use it when I play with personal projects, but I don't know what other sites do because I rarely have a console pulled up in my browser when I'm just using it, rather than developing.
      • bawolff 6y ago
        Its often used with bulk file downloads (e.g. curl a multi-gb file while transfering between wifi networks), as well as video streaming sometimes (buffering)
    • lixtra 6y ago
      Download managers that speed up downloads use this feature. I.e. they use 2 threads, 1 download from the beginning and the other continueing from the middle of the file. This fools single connection throttling measures.
    • flatlanderwoman 6y ago
      Quote from project FAQ: > Gemini has no support for caching, compression, or resumption of interrupted downloads. As such, it's not very well suited to distributing large files, for values of "large" which depend upon the speed and reliability of your network connection. https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html
  • csande17 6y ago
    > How is a network protocol proof against being used to transport CSS files? Does the network stack inspect what you're shipping and ensure you're only sending 100% Pure Plain Text? The Gemini specification includes its own format for pages, which is a text-based scheme inspired by Markdown and Gopher menus. You can use the Gemini protocol to transmit things other than Gemini pages, sort of like how you can use HTTP to transmit PDFs and Word documents, but you wouldn't build your whole site out of them. (At least that's my impression, I haven't gotten around to actually visiting many Gemini sites yet.)
  • flatlanderwoman 6y ago
    > How is a network protocol proof against being used to transport CSS files? Does the network stack inspect what you're shipping and ensure you're only sending 100% Pure Plain Text? It's just like the web, the transport protocol (HTTP/S) can be used on any file. But there is a separate spec for the document format (HTML etc.). You could transport CSS over Gemini, just don't expect any of the browsers to render it. Just like how web browsers won't execute alternate scripting languages natively. > Isn't that TCP's job? Is this person saying Gemini doesn't use TCP? I didn't really elaborate on this point while writing, because I had nothing to add. I will quote from the projects FAQ: >> Gemini has no support for caching, compression, or resumption of interrupted downloads. As such, it's not very well suited to distributing large files, for values of "large" which depend upon the speed and reliability of your network connection. Hopefully that clears up what I meant. > Back in the Gopher days, my "Gemini browser" would be my Web browser. You might be interested in Castor[1]. It's a browser for the minimalist internet. Rolls support for Gemini, Gopher and Finger all in one. I can understand why FF removed support. But hopefully smaller applications, like Castor, can fill this gap. [1]: https://sr.ht/~julienxx/Castor/ https://sr.ht/~julienxx/Castor/
    • bawolff 6y ago
      >>Gemini has no support for caching, compression, or resumption of interrupted downloads. As such, it's not very well suited to distributing large files, for values of "large" which depend upon the speed and reliability of your network connection. Which honestly is pretty silly, as lots of caching is about reducing latency for small files not saving bandwidth for large files. Suppose it matters less if the documents are self contained.
    • dragonwriter 6y ago
      > You could transport CSS over Gemini, just don't expect any of the browsers to render it. If Gemini is ever of even domain-specific serious use, I'd expect both the format and protocol to be added to what is supported by existing major web browsers (it can't be both tractable for small implementers and intractable for Apple/Google/Mozilla), which, as it turns out, know how to support the combination of HTML/CSS/JS just fine and won't likely forget just because a different transfer protocol is involved. Presenting a DOM mapping for Gemini format pages and exposing it at least to extensions even if there is no way to include page scripts doesn't seem unlikely, either.
• juanbyrge 6y ago
  A better approach to Gemini would be to create a UGC web app that allows people to create simple, text-only, markdown-enabled content that does not track users. And I think plenty of those exist already. It would be the circa 2004 era blogging platforms.
  • vertex-four 6y ago
    And then someone adds some privacy violating javascript to their site, and everybody who linked to them before is now pointing their readers right back into the big bad web. The creator of Gemini has a post about this, linked above.
  • flatlanderwoman 6y ago
    I don't think this would be any better then a static site generator, or even something like Mastodon (assuming it has markdown support).
    • peteyboy 6y ago
      It's not better except that a person browsing doesn't know what pages are or aren't done with a simple site generator.
  • SllX 6y ago
    My understanding of Gemini’s raison d’être is that the JavaScript-laden app-filled WWW is an anti-feature so doing anything with Gemini and web apps would be contradictory. Probably won’t stop someone from trying.
    • dragonwriter 6y ago
      Well, there's nothing stopping you from serving HTML/CSS/JS web apps over the Gemini protocol. (Nothing stopping you from building a browser that handles gemini format documents and does special things with JS links, either, though to avoid accidental execution issues you would probably need to extend the format to distinguish “links I want to execute” from other links.)
• triptych 6y ago
  Why not just set up a site that only allows markdown with plain pages and get all the benefits you list without a new protocol?
  • ivanstojic 6y ago
    That's actually covered in the deeper linked docs on Gemini. Setting it up on a separate protocol / markup allows you to make hard reasoning about what kind of privacy, features and protection you get as a user, rather than relying on the goodwill or current promises of your content provider.
    • echelon 6y ago
      This won't get traction. It'd be better to declare a new doctype and use a reduced html. Just make it simple and make ads and JS bloat impossible. Enforcing ssl is kind of silly since browsers are starting to do that anyway independent of this. It's orthogonal.
      • vertex-four 6y ago
        It’s not meant to “get traction” in the Silicon Valley sense of “everyone must use this or there is DOOM”, it’s meant to be useful for the communities that use it. If you open the Gemini link posted below about why just defining a new doctype wouldn’t work, give it a read.
        • Barrin92 6y ago
          >It’s not meant to “get traction” in the Silicon Valley sense of “everyone must use this or there is DOOM”, it’s meant to be useful for the communities that use it. If you're building a protocol that enforces certain strict standards, like in this case being text only because the internet is 'bloated' according to the author, then the only point of having it is adoption beyond your community. If all you want to do is communicate with ardent non-bloat advocates you can already do this on the regular internet, because everyone in that community does it voluntarily already There's no point in codyfing standards for a community that follows your standards to begin with
• rado 6y ago
  The linked site is perfectly fine on the Web.
• algerd 6y ago
  Here we go again. Solving social problems with technical staff.
  • dredmorbius 6y ago
    Protocols are actually part of the glue between technical and social domains.
• pacifika 6y ago
  This is hard to understand for someone not familiar with Gopher, but I’m interested in how menus are handled. I’ve always wished browsers handle site menus in their chrome, so that the document can be focused on content not navigation. It’s the browsers job! For a while Opera supported these related links in the head for some pages but the dev was unable to add their own, it was limited to a small number of standard items such as Index. These were shown in a browser toolbar. Nonstandard navigation have always been a point of friction for users as it precludes universal access by having to relearn how each site works.
  • vertex-four 6y ago
    Gemini documents can contain lines that are text or lines that are links - so a menu looks like a list of links, one per line.
• mattlondon 6y ago
  I feel like the lack of image support is a missed opportunity. I know it is an idealogical choice to only have text, but being able to embed standard image formats (on a totally plain, non fancy way) would increase the utility of this hugely. They mention blogs and tutorials and recipes here - those would benefit hugely from having simple inline images within the body of the text, just like you expect in a newspaper etc. I guess I am not the target market then.
  • flatlanderwoman 6y ago
    So did I. But I'm not going to let one drawback distract me from something otherwise very good, nothing is perfect after all. I can even understand why they did it. To keep the doc format very simple. I hope that more clients will add unique rendering features that will turn this drawback on it's head. It could be in-line rendering or a gallery-like feature.
  • masklinn 6y ago
    > just like you expect in a newspaper etc. Technical paper is what I was thinking about there. Furthermore, since Gemini apparently lacks support for mathematical notation images would be necessary for such even if the paper doesn't intrinsically contain non-textual images (e.g. pictures, charts, or graphs, which are common though not universal).
  • Taikonerd 6y ago
    I understand why they didn't allow inline images, but I agree with you it limits a lot of use cases. If I were designing it, I would say: "you can have images, but they always display as a 'block element', with nothing to either side. No worries about wrapping text; no background images under other elements, etc." I think that keeps the spirit of simplicity.
    • lal 6y ago
      you can have images and they don't always display as anything. the author of the user agent decides how they are displayed. you could in-line them if you wanted to, but only a few clients do that at the moment. there are no hints to the client about how some content could, should, or should "always display as". It's text. The client displays that text and renders links, headings, etc, however it wishes. If it really wants to, it could just not format them at all. There's a gemini client made for plan9's acme text editor that doesn't render links, and instead displays them verbatim, because the plan9 plumber can handle the hyperlinking aspect. All of that is eye candy and fluff. If a client finds a link to an image, it can in-line it if it wants. If you wrote a client, when it found a link to an image, it would in-line it "with nothing to either side." That's not something that has to be specced.
• efitz 6y ago
  A large part of HTML, and a large part of modern browsers and other web technologies, are focused on ensuring that the publisher has control over the user's experience. I really like the fact that Gemini breaks that, and I hope that the project owners mercilessly reject any attempt to introduce features that allow the server to control or influence user experience. I would really like to see structured text that is self-descriptive (e.g. this is the document title, this is a paragraph, this is a header, bullet list, etc.) but have no ability to influence HOW those things are displayed- eventually maybe we'll have browsers that can support rich theming, etc. Others have noted that lack of images is an oversight. Perhaps the language needs a "binary file download" structure, and if the binary in question is a media file, then the browser could choose to display it. Maybe signal with mime types?
  • vertex-four 6y ago
    There is a binary file download feature, the browser can do whatever it wants with binary files, and it's signaled with mime types.
  • dennisy 6y ago
    If the browser can support rich theming, I guess it can load any images inline if the user wishes.
  • rakoo 6y ago
    Would it be too simple to say that you're looking for HTML without CSS ? Because HTML already has semantic tags describing "this is the title" "this is a list" etc...
    • amelius 6y ago
      But then you get tools which generate HTML which circumvents that (e.g. a giant table with 1x1 pixel cells, each cell with its own color).
      • rakoo 6y ago
        As a producer you can always circumvent the constraints imposed by a software. You can use a "this-is-a-title" tag to make text appear bigger, you can use a "this-is-a-list" tag to make content linear instead of using paragraphs, etc... What I'm saying is that there can't be a format that isn't hacked and exploited to allow the publisher to do what they want, because ultimately it's their content so they control it. Maybe limiting the existing tags in HTML is a good idea (AFAIK that's one of the strategies of AMP) but reinventing a structured format will just lead to HTML-but-less. If you want to give control to user, then you have to do that from the User Agent: forbid any publisher-provided styling, allow only certain tags, are going to actually do what you want, instead of inventing yet another format
• bawolff 6y ago
  This seems almost identical to http/0.9, and early versions of html Soo umm. Just use netscape 2.0 (+modern TLS)
  • flatlanderwoman 6y ago
    If one were after a minimalist browser they would be better of with something like NetSurf. But that puts it at odds with 90% of the current web. Everything I find on Gemini will be compatible with my browser.
• avian 6y ago
  > Blogs, [..] are perfect for the Gemini format. > Gemini lacks in-line images This is the only part that I don't really understand about Gemini. Even the most basic printed publications can include illustrations. <img> got added to HTML very early on because sometimes it's hard to share some piece of information in anything but a visual form. I write a (mostly) technical blog that certainly focuses more on text content than images. I would be happy to throw away the header, sidebar and the rest of the "design" cruft (in fact my blog is perfectly usable in a browser that doesn't support CSS or Javascript) But I can't imagine having my posts without graphs, diagrams and photos inserted in the text. If the fear is that in-line images would lead to frivolous use as ads or "useless multi-megabyte header images", then maybe a better approach would be to limit the number, or size, of images on each page? Some scientific publications do exactly that in an attempt to force the authors to focus on selecting only the most important images that need to accompany their papers.
  • mrob 6y ago
    No technical limitation is suitable. The appropriate number or size of images depends on the accompanying text. Setting it high enough to allow all legitimate uses makes it weak enough that you might as well have no limit. And even a low limit does nothing to prevent annoying use up to that limit. The best possible limit is "must convince the reader to click it".
    • avian 6y ago
      I guess that's a reasonable position to take. It reminds me of paper publications where you have all the figures on color plates bound in the middle/end, so I guess it isn't without precedent On the other hand, it made me think of old Usenet posts and discussions. That was another medium where you were limited to plain-text only. Posts were often forced to resort to awful ASCII-art drawings of things they wanted to explain and that was just a horrible experience altogether (not to mention how fun those drawings are to decipher today where modern archives have mostly messed up the white space).
      • vertex-four 6y ago
• yaur 6y ago
  > Gemini, being a recent protocol, mandates the use of TLS. and also > it misses many features that protocols such as FTP or HTTP use to recover from network instability What? These statements are at totally different levels of the OSI model.
  • arghwhat 6y ago
    No it's not. I think you might have misunderstood the latter, which just refers to the Gopher model having no transfer resume functionality, such as HTTP Ranges, meaning an interrupted transfer must restart.
  • progval 6y ago
    About TLS: it means the spec requires Gemini to be encapsulated in TLS; the same way RFC 2616 recommends HTTP be encapsulated in both TCP and IP ("HTTP communication usually takes place over TCP/IP connections"). Yes, technically they are abstraction violations, but they are commonplace for network protocols. about network instability: it doesn't refer to congestion and packet loss handling in TCP, but to the "Range" feature of HTTP, which allows downloading only a subset of a file, to resume an interrupted TCP connection.
• docuru 6y ago
  How the web today is how it has evolved. I think it is hard to change the flow of water. I mean, for example, if Gemini evolved, it would still somehow be what the web became!
  • ketzu 6y ago
    I feel similar. Projects like gemini work, because they are niche, not despite it. If it became mainstream similar forces that drive the web to what it is woule take hold.
    • l0b0 6y ago
      Yeah, designers would hack around the limitations until the hacks become official (against the original protocol inventors' intent, if necessary), because every company wants to control the experience of their content to an unreasonable degree. I recently turned off the "Allow pages to choose their own fonts" setting in Firefox, and it's refreshing to read text in O(1) rather than O(N) fonts. Now if only similar tweaks were as easy to apply to web forms, menus etc.
  • dredmorbius 6y ago
    The Web's evolution has largely been at the direction of advertiser, publisher, and corporate interests. Not the public, readers, and authors.
    • qayxc 6y ago
      Thank the gods it was! I'm still traumatised by the <blink>-tags and dancing banana GIFs of the old days... I mean, sure - 404 pages with dry "Oops" or "Not found" messages are way more boring, but I really don't miss getting to see GOATSE or TUB GIRL (don't look up either if you're not familiar with it) every other time I click an outdated link... There's very little that works if it's development is driven by a community as large and diverse (in terms of sometimes opposing interests and goals) as "the public".
      • 6y ago
• aronpye 6y ago
  How is introducing yet another new technology, incompatible with what everyone else is using, any better than just creating a minimalist static HTML website?
  • arghwhat 6y ago
    Because the problem is the technology everyone else is using The issue isn't bloated websites as much as the web itself.
    • aronpye 6y ago
      How is the issue not bloated websites? You can easily create a text only website in HTML which is compatible with every existing internet capable device. All technology can be misused, it isn’t necessarily a problem with the underlying technology. By introducing yet more standards and technologies, you end up creating bloat and fragmentation of a different kind.
      • tryauuum 6y ago
        There is also an allure of having a client that will never run some weird god-know-what-doing javascript code. Of course you can just disable javascript in your HTTP browser. But as the author states, it's easier to write a completely new client than to disable all the bloat in e.g. firefox.
        • aronpye 6y ago
          Agreed, but like I’ve said elsewhere the effort would be better spent modifying an existing browser to be lightweight. That would gain more widespread adoption than a whole new client-server protocol. You’d also gain the benefit of better interoperability with screen readers and such like.
          • vertex-four 6y ago
            Nobody involved in Gemini wants "widespread adoption", because that inevitably means big commercial organisations coming into the space where right now they're having a lovely time building a community. Screen readers handle Gemini just fine - one of the clients I've tried outputs text and buttons in a GTK window, another literally just outputs text into a terminal and takes command line input, if a screenreader couldn't handle that I'd be horrified. The format is paragraph-based, there's very little styling, no guessing at what the main content on a page is.
• tluyben2 6y ago
  No mention of JS; not even a Gemini server in Node[0]. Finally a sane place to hang out! Kidding, but only half. The 'everything must be done in JS' is fairly annoying imho. [0]https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/software/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/softw...
  • flatlanderwoman 6y ago
    A Gemini implementation in JS: https://github.com/derhuerst/gemini https://github.com/derhuerst/gemini
    • tluyben2 6y ago
      Great, doesn't disappoint; includes horrible emoji's :]
      • flatlanderwoman 6y ago
        Emoji's are part of Unicode. Not bloat.
        • tluyben2 6y ago
          I wasn't thinking of bloat; it just looks unprofessional, in my opinion, and it is also very related to people who work with js almost exclusively.
  • IshKebab 6y ago
    Sure but "you can't use JS at all" is fairly annoying too.
    • tluyben2 6y ago
      Sure, I would never say that; pick the best tool for the job. Just 'everything' with JS is definitely not that.
• meigwilym 6y ago
  This seems to be RSS with extra server setup but no images.
• ketzu 6y ago
  I think calling gemini an alternative to the web has a very limited view of the web. It takes an idea someone has of what the web should be: a set of text documents. That's a very small subset of the web, not just of today. Building separate protocols for all the various use-cases of the web would be interesting, but would still need some interconnection. But I'm not convinced that has many advantages besides not being accidentally linked to a websited of the "Old web." A problem that could be reduced by a browser extension that strictly blocks any external urls and javascript.
  • flatlanderwoman 6y ago
    > Building separate protocols for all the various use-cases of the web would be interesting, but would still need some interconnection. Whilst using Castor, www urls would auto-open in Firefox, and the other way around.
    • sloum 6y ago
      Same with using Bombadillo in a terminal (assuming a graphical environment is present and the user has set webmode to GUI).
  • kristopolous 6y ago
    The separate protocol for everything is essentially what things were like prior to about 1994. There was a protocol for searching documents, a protocol for looking up someone's email, it was all partitioned out. The web was seen as just another fish in the pond. After the web became big, these things still lasted for a while However spam and crooks changed it all. Usenet became useless, DNS full domain lookups (you used to be able to get a list of all the subdomains of a domain through the command line and you could just browse then out of curiosity), using whois for email (you could just query for a name and get an email address over whois), it's all gone because there's too many snakes trying to scam people and flood the network. Things used to be much better tools but it turns out they were too good and had no defenses. The dream of everybody connecting has sort of been retracted a bit. RMS, TBL, Torvalds, I could just send them an email in the 90s and they'd respond, it was pretty remarkable. It's not the case any more. Not even minor players in history (such as an author from a 25 year old book) respond to my questions. People just don't do that anymore. Spam, harassment, criminals, ill will, this all has to be a big priority if we want to try it again. The future should be the dreams of our better angels, building better tomorrows...
• Lio 6y ago
  This would be interesting for a terminal based web alternative. A practical use would be something like O'Reilly's Safari Books Online. The author mentions that fancy Gemini reader apps could allow linking to images, since that some terminals allow images to be displayed[1] that would fit nicely too. Why not just use text based websites and something like w3m? Well it's hard to tell when opening a link in the terminal will be useful and when it would be better to open the link in a "real" browser like Firefox. e.g. after a git push to github I'm provided with a link to create a PR. I really when I click that link I really want it to open in Firefox. [1] Off the top of my head Kitty and iTerm2 both allow image display from apps such as the ranger file manager.
• jonnypotty 6y ago
  What network instability recovery features are there in http and ftp? I thought that was all in tcp?
  • ptr 6y ago
    The author is probably thinking about HTTP partial/range requests ("resumable downloads"); they can recover even if the TCP connection is closed.
    • jonnypotty 6y ago
      That makes sense. You don't get this in ftp thou right?
  • carapace 6y ago
    Gemini servers don't tell you the size of the file they're sending.
• andreigaspar 6y ago
  Breaking: Sacred texts from 680 B.C. are a simple alternative to high-budget Hollywood movies JK, interesting read but the idealism is stronggg.
• ilaksh 6y ago
  I just wish they had not insisted on TLS and closing connections. It defeats the purpose to me because you are going to be delayed constantly by new TLS startups.
  • troupe 6y ago
    If the expected use case is to spend a long time reading a document with no images, is that much of an issue?
• ilaksh 6y ago
  If anyone is interested I have an idea along these lines under runvnc/noscriptweb on GitHub. https://github.com/runvnc/noscriptweb https://github.com/runvnc/noscriptweb Its probably going to stay as just an idea because other projects have priority.
• bluefox 6y ago
  It feels like the main feature of this project is incompatibility with HTTP. The protocol is new and primitive, it's easy to write tools around it, write texts about it, etc. A small community forms, and you're part of it. You can advertise it to others, or rant against the mainstream, or whatever. But now what? You lose interest and abandon it, and eventually it dies. We already have a transport protocol that "everybody" agrees on: HTTP. We can define a specification for a subset of it, and a subset of HTML/browser features we want, create tools around them, and form a small community. The advantage here is that the community is not an island. Users of Big Browser can still read your latest rants. They can even learn about this project and, while perhaps not using Mom-and-Pop browser, may support it in their sites, since it wouldn't require another server; mostly just having their site work without JavaScript would be a huge step forward. Right, you don't have Google filtering based on Accessibility. The community can create a search engine that does. Now what? You just get on with your life, producing and consuming AccessibleWeb content without the gratuitous incompatibility.
  • ozim 6y ago
    I totally agree with that. It is not like some web police force is holding people at gunpoint to add javascript and angular or react. People use all those features because they want to and they find it useful.
    • coronadisaster 6y ago
      > they find it useful Sometimes it is just the latest trend...
    • Symbiote 6y ago
      This protocol doesn't seem to be aimed at commercial use, but the "web police" called "the manager" or "the marketing department" or whatever are the ones forcing the use of the privacy-invading tools.
    • iamstupidsimple 6y ago
      The original Facebook and Google did not use much JavaScript, so I'm always skeptical when literal documents need it for anything other than ads (and even then...).
• spiritplumber 6y ago
  Would this help usability over a slow link (let's say a 9600bps radio modem), or is Gopher better for that purpose?
  • sloum 6y ago
    Gopher will be faster by nature of gemini using TLS. However, gopher is inherently less secure than gemini. If you are wanting the TLS, gemini _should_ load your document faster than the https (even with minimal headers included for the https version, there is still more header overhead to just make the request and there is a lot more header overhead in most responses).
• bertman 6y ago
  Regarding the quote at the end of the blog post: "When I picture it in my head I think of the early web as more of a library. Over time it has transitioned into a shopping mall." - chris_f (Hacker News comments) There are still books in a shopping mall. You have to know where to look and not get distracted at every corner, though.
  • devaler 6y ago
    You’re confusing a library with a bookstore. Libraries are repositories of information that one can browse.
• spiritplumber 6y ago
  If you want to show circuit diagrams, have you considered the Parallax Propeller font?
• JohnStrangeII 6y ago
  I've been thinking about something similar for a while, but kind of disagree with Gemini's scope and implementation. I think that the lack of inline images is too limiting. In my opinion, a good replacement for the WWW should have the following features: - ToS that strictly prohibits commercial use and advertising. We have the WWW for that, no need to duplicate it. - Uses HTTPS or something similar. This allows use of efficient servers like Nginx. - Based on a virtual display with fixed dimensions and orientations, 2-3 aspect ratios and vertical/horizontal orientation. Fixed virtual pixel solution. Every page is fixed in size and in the length of unicode text it can display. - Uses a structured document format with a limited number of logical tags. The client displays the page as it likes (no styling directives in the document markup). Every page written in this format is compiled into an efficient and compressed binary representation for transmission. - Limited number of links, overlays, and images per page. Input fields with validation should be allowed. Inline images and movies are limited in size. I'm planning to implement something like this in my forthcoming virtual Lisp machine (z3s5.com), though it's going to be a bit less general and probably not be based on HTTPS.
• guerrilla 6y ago
  I was just talking to someone about an idea like this. I even thought about making a Gtk+ widget for it, having no idea this existed. I really like the idea of viewers being the ones who decide presentation and something like Markdown (with images and videos) could work well for that. I'm not sure why we'd need a new protocol for it though, other than to escape the web.
• surajs 6y ago
  sounds like another gimmick but okay
• vbezhenar 6y ago
  I would take an alternative position in this matter. What we need is a simple yet functional subset of web. The point is to be able to build a browser in a reasonable amount of time with many languages reusing some commonly used libraries, while being able to use latest Chrome to browse those websites as well. TLS: keep it as it is. Crypto is hard and TLS is proven crypto. Mandate something like 1.2+ and be done with it. Every mature language has TLS implementation or bindings. HTTP: use subset of HTTP/1.1. Parsing is very easy: it's just bunch of lines. Full HTTP/1.1 is hard and probably unnecessary. Things like connection reuse are not necessary and should be excluded for simplicity. HTML: use subset of XHTML. It must be valid XML, so parsing is just one call to the XML library which is available on every language. CSS: I don't really know, that's a tough one. Something like CSS 2 I guess. There must be a balance between complexity of implementation and richness of presentation. JavaScript: just nope. That rabbit hole is too deep. If you take this position to the extreme, you can even reduce HTML + CSS to some kind of markdown-like language, but I don't think that we need to go that far.
  • sangfroid_bio 6y ago
    I think WebAssembly+low-level DOM API would be a good compromise for the lack of JavaScript.
    • als0 6y ago
      I think the grandparent's point is specifically against embedded scripts rather than JavaScript itself, since it can be used to make HTML less like a document, and there's also the proverbial can of worms where you automatically run Turing complete code from an unknown person.
      • vbezhenar 6y ago
        Actually I'm thinking about complexity of implementation and security consequences. I'm not sure that JavaScript interpreters are so common and bundling V8 just kind of defeats the whole purpose... Implementing JavaScript is not an easy task, it also requires implementing plenty of APIs like DOM access, XHR, complex event system, to be any useful. And ability to evaluate a Turing-complete code poses just another level of security issues. Whether it makes HTML less like a document is up to author to decide, IMO. Some JS snippets are pretty useful, some are not. You can use JS to implement an interactive learning system or you can use JS to spy on users. Wasm probably is easier to implement that JavaScript. But it still carries other issues mentioned above.
• rikroots 6y ago
  > I have really come to hate the World Wide Web. It is bloated at every level! I have to admit that this opening statement almost stopped me reading the rest of the article. Which is a pity, because Gemini does sound like an interesting endeavour. I went searching (via the bloated World Wide Web) and found the Gemini FAQ page (https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/faq.html) which (in my opinion) makes a much better argument for considering this alternative approach to delivering content over the wire. > I could totally see Gemini being used as an alternative particularly for the non-comerical individuals who use text as a primary medium. Blogs, poems, recepies, tutorials are perfect for the Gemini format. The one big thought I had - as a content developer (I write poems: I will never apologise for this) - as I read through the FAQ was: "Yet another distribution channel to maintain" ... because Gemini reminds me (probably unfairly) of WAP and its Wireless Markup Language. Back in the day I was very keen to inflict my poems on everybody in the world: I posted them on Usenet (mainly RAP), various web-based bulletin boards, a Blogger Blog (with a blogroll!) and, of course, my own poetry website. Reaching out to a mobile-centred audience was the next logical step. But the mechanics of the effort defeated me, and I soon grew to truly detest WML and its stupid limitations. I suppose, in 2020, adding another communications channel to my current website's toolchain should be a lot easier ... but I don't want to do the work. If the people around Gemini can get more passionate content creators to do the necessary work, then maybe it will have an interesting/exciting future?
  • brigandish 6y ago
    > I write poems: I will never apologise for this Don't apologise, share a link!
    • rikroots 6y ago
      Hah! Do you have insurance? Are your vaccinations up-to-date?? https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/ https://rikverse2020.rikweb.org.uk/
      • brigandish 6y ago
        I also write poetry, not only am I immune but I believe in karma :) I'll give them a read, thanks.
• jamesfisher 6y ago
  Meanwhile, the other post at the top of HN is a visual explanation of sphere eversion [1] that relies on the web being a system for distributing _sandboxed applications_, and so would be completely impossible in this Gemini system. [1] https://rreusser.github.io/explorations/sphere-eversion/ https://rreusser.github.io/explorations/sphere-eversion/
• Recurecur 6y ago
  This seems like a fair enough idea, except that there should be provision for "rich content boxes" that might contain images, forms, WebGL or other things that Gemini intentionally forgoes. Having a "web browser" that can't do interactive content at all (no, server-side CGI doesn't count) is a non-starter in 2020. What if I need an interactive chart?
  • peteyboy 6y ago
    You could make a regular http web page for your interactive chart...
• LoSboccacc 6y ago
  > although Gemini lacks in-line images, you can still use in-line links to images this is telling. not only it's inconvenient, but claiming link to images are good enough for blog and recipe pages makes me think the audiences are completely misunderstood. weird because text driven interface like airline reservations still exist and porting them on a common protocol would provide immediate tangible benefits today without the backward thinking about media
  • sloum 6y ago
    I do not think it is inconvenient at all, it is just different that what people have come to expect.
    • LoSboccacc 6y ago
      inline illustrations predate internet by hundreds years. imagine a child book but all the images are in the appendix. it is the definition of inconvenient. it's usable, but it's not like inline media is a modern or even contemporary concept.
• squarefoot 6y ago
  The web has become much more than a protocol for reading documents: controls that communicate both ways with the server so that they can be also updated in real time is a really useful aspect that won't make them go away anytime soon. I rather wonder if the browser is the best interface for that, or if html is the best protocol for that use. The answer would probably be obvious: "one software doing all is cheaper to produce and maintain than two or three doing each one its own business (and we can still blame the user hardware for the added slowness)."
• eaandkw 6y ago
  Won't work. As soon as it gains any traction hackers/crackers will figure out how to exploit people. Marketers will figure out how to optimise it to sell you crap you don't need. Left wing/ Right wing censors and moderators will silence at least a portion of the users if not the whole project because "reasons". Oh yeah, the government will also be there to ensure that you can't do anything without them knowing about it. Honestly the web could be great with the technologies that are out now. At this very moment. But it isn't.
• gingerlime 6y ago
  Can Gemini be used for something like HN? e.g. nested threads? (or that’s basically Usenet?)
  • sloum 6y ago
    I believe there is a lobste.rs mirror (not sure about hacker news). It includes the comments, but in a read only presentation (gemini is more or less inherently read only; though there is a separate protocol called titan that handles writing for gemini servers that support it).
  • acdw 6y ago
    There's a list of mirrored services here: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gempaper.strangled.net/mirrorlist/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gempaper.strangled.net/mirrorl... (http link) gemini://gempaper.strangled.net/mirrorlist/ (gemini link) I think it gets updated semiregularly.
    • flatlanderwoman 6y ago
      Good link thanks! Added to article.
• steeleduncan 6y ago
  Could most of this not be achieved by adding a markdown mode to Firefox? Whenever text/markdown content type is received it would display it using a stylesheet set by the user. It could skip cookies, etc in this mode to reduce, if not completely eliminate, tracking.
  • peteyboy 6y ago
    I'm waiting for folks to look at gemini, see only part of what they want, and make markdown-native web protocol, a wiki protocol, basically. I think that would be very cool, and it is what drew me to gemini before I figured out it was really super-gopher. Like what if there was a mediawiki protocol? You'd have your tables! Anyway, there's no one stopping anybody for trying to make that happen. The true interwiki promised in the days of c2, could actually happen!... if some people want to make it happen.
• loraa 6y ago
  It's great that people have ideas, but they are best spent on improving the current standards as mass adoption of a completely new web standard by a few unknowns is going to be a rough ride.
• hkt 6y ago
  Is gemini featureful enough to build a sign-up form where I could pay for stuff? I ask only because it seems like the commitment of commercial players seems like a prerequisite for the success of stuff like this.
  • sloum 6y ago
    The almost full and complete point of this is to REMOVE the ability of "commercial players" from having a role or interest in the platform at all. They have already ruined the web and society as a whole (but that gets into a whole argument for/against capitalism... take a wild guess where I stand).
    • hkt 6y ago
      I'm not a great fan of capitalism, but really my favourite thing about it is the seeming inability of commercial players to surveil. I don't like the idea of building in the price of content as being nothing - I want to donate to bloggers etc. A way around this is to mix gemini and http in a single browser. Only one can be rendered on a page, but they can link to one another, with a warning when you transition between the two. So blogs could have a donate button that just hits paypal etc.
• ehnto 6y ago
  The web is partly broken due to the sheer expanse of it. The author of the article alludes to how they enjoys looking at the aggregator, and notes they can always find something interesting. If Gemini ever became as popular as the web, that would stop being true. So the selling point of Gemini is that by staying rudimentary, it can limit it's appeal, and subsequently stay unpopular enough to be more like "The Old Web". I think that's worth noting, because you could get trapped into thinking this is a technology problem, but it's really a people problem.
  • baryphonic 6y ago
    > If Gemini ever became as popular as the web, that would stop being true. Your implication may be true, but Gemini will never become as popular as the web (well unless the web becomes extremely unpopular at the expense of something else besides Gemini). My wife would see "no images" and that would be the beginning and end of using Gemini for her.
  • dancek 6y ago
    You have a very good point. However, Gemini does not exist in a vacuum. The web will be there. There will be social media platforms, multimedia, awesome webapps and all that. And Gemini is just text. When you have the choice between easily consumable infinite multimedia and just text, you only pick the latter when you really care about the quality of text content. It's not sexy so all the spammers, content marketers and ego boosters have nothing to gain on Gemini. And so there can be this esoteric little corner of the internet, with down-to-earth text content written by ordinary people.
• _-___________-_ 6y ago
  I've spent the last few hours browsing Gemini, and it feels more like the early web than anything I've experienced in the decades since. I love it.
• otabdeveloper4 6y ago
  > <URL> is a UTF-8 encoded absolute URL, of maximum length 1024 bytes. This is never a good idea.
• dangoor 6y ago
  What if the problem statement (what is something like this trying to solve) is: 1. No tracking beyond what the server gets via standard logging 2. Document styling control in the hands of the user agent 3. Navigation control in the hands of the user agent 4. Compatibility with existing web browsers would be a bonus Points 2 and 3 imply some kind of semantically-clear markup. Would definitely want to think of forward/backward compatibility (something the web has been fairly good at). Point 1 means no cookies, likely nothing like JS, images need to come from the same server (either packaged in the initial request or forced to come from the same host). Point 4 is a nice to have and may be possible if this is built on a subset of HTML and HTTP. One possibility is that if the server receives a request that looks like it's coming from a standard browser, it can serve up the page with some JS and CSS that fill in the stuff that would normally be done by the user agent. IMHO, something built on a stack that looks like that would be a better fit for 2020 than something based off of Gopher's approach.
• antihero 6y ago
  Don't get this fad of hate to be honest. The web, fucked as it is, works. Obviously there's a load of cruft because humans will try and exploit any system, but if our only problems are our Macbooks spinning their fans up a bit, it's a beef that really only irks purists. Day to day, talking to people, people don't bitch about the web other than about invasive adverts. Frankly I think a lot of commentary stems from backend people being annoyed that frontend people earn a bunch of money for work they deem insignificant.
• wolfspider 6y ago
  One of the things I find refreshing about Gemini is there is no standard scripting language in there and the implementations vary wildly on the client side from Rust to Lua to Python to Go as well as the server-side. It made me realize perhaps browser technology for the Web got locked into specific domain-centric technologies which have held it back. There is so much C/C++ required for JavascriptCore and friends in a modern browser there is only one real choice to code in. Mozilla has made great advancements with Rust in Firefox but still a long ways off from a total conversion. It's not that its not possible but if you want to tap into the work which has already been done in JavascriptCore or other technologies you certainly cannot just pick your own backend or language. Gemini's efforts on the other hand are being brought up in parallel and in the open so that is a major strength that the ecosystem is already much more broad from the beginning. Building a modern browser from source nowadays is an intensive process on a single mid-range workstation just due to the fact much of the extra functionality is compulsory and not opt-in. Many of these modules were meant to be pluggable but somewhere along the way they became coupled dependencies of each other. A good example is Electron where in theory it should be just the things you need and a subset of a browser where applicable but instead you need the whole browser engine every single time.
• dukoid 6y ago
  I'd find it an effort to standardize text/terminal-friendly accessible HTML+CSS much more appealing. And the TLS requirement seems to make it harder to get started for pure "fun" projects.
  • ac29 6y ago
    One of the goals of the project seems to eliminate all of the ways the current web can violate user's privacy. Without encryption, I dont think Gemini could claim to be better.
• electronstudio 6y ago
  Last time this was posted I started working on a Gemini client: https://github.com/electronstudio/2face https://github.com/electronstudio/2face Currently it’s TUI, but will add GUI eventually. It’s fun to have a protocol small enough you can implement it yourself, but I currently have a weird bug where some Gemini servers work and others don’t because they don’t seem to follow the SSL spec.
• jansc 6y ago
  I wrote an ncurses-based gemini and gopher client a while ago: https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher https://github.com/jansc/ncgopher I really like the gemini protocol because of its simplicity and its text-based nature. Spending most days in a terminal, text consumption is so much easier with a gemini client then e.g. lynx for webpages (which won't work 99% of the time).
• smoyer 6y ago
  I've recently switched from Markdown to ASCIIDoc ... the article makes it sound like the browser is optimized for text but isn't it really the server that's rendering the text that's sent? In this case, I like the idea of minimal styling mostly because my eyes are getting old but as others have stated, why isn't this specification a small subset of the existing internet?
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• Silke_Mousepad 6y ago
  > a brutally simple alternative to the web Yip and gemini's markup is so simple that it is useless for me. :-( Combining a restricted HTML maybe with 1-file-only limit (use data url for insets) with gemini's protocol could make sense for me. "rHTML" like PDF, all in one file, maybe a bit JS for rendering maths, but maybe there are other/better ways to do it (no maths in PICs please!). Or brutally different? Distribute DVIs over gemini://? I like the 1-file-only style in the dimension gemini and apart from not yet having automated images to data-url-conversion, ... sigh ...my image-less HTML stuff already is 1-file-only.
• tylerchilds 6y ago
  I'm a Gemini newb, but I've enjoyed using the AV-98 client so far: https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/AV-98 https://tildegit.org/solderpunk/AV-98 If Gemini sounds like a dumb idea, I'd highly encourage you to move along. If Gemini sounds intriguing, you'll probably have fun. Lots of opinions in this thread, but doesn't look like many armchairs have tried it. Personally, I've enjoyed the rabbit hole.
• lyrachord 6y ago
  NO more experiences of designs (protocol, document, ui, security...) found in the idea. All these things require a simplest one: structure. Structure lives matter.
• scorecard 6y ago
  Are there other projects similar to Gemini? Of these projects, which is most likely to still exist 5 years from now?
  • peteyboy 6y ago
    I don't know, are there? I don't know, do you?
• bonestormii_ 6y ago
  It's like wearing clothing. If I wear a polo and dress pants, and I'm on the train at 8am, I'm going to white collar work. If I wear jeans at the same time and have my partner with me, I'm a middle class, middle aged, probably-parent on personal business that could probably be described as "running an errand". If I'm a 42 year old man wearing bright purple halter top, with black lipstick and combat boots on the train at 8am--you don't know me! Where the hell am I going? How am I living? You don't understand how to talk to me, so don't bother unless you are a 27 year old woman with red eye liner, green air, blue lipstick and a brady bunch t-shirt on! We wouldn't understand each other! Elaborate protocol jokes aside, it's an apt analogy. It works--for some people, some of the time. They are dreamers living life waiting for a tomorrow that may never come, but the cause gives them their identity. Chances are that Bob and Linda still have to straighten up on Monday mornings and assimilate to the general protocol. But that's the world we live in, is it not? I like it. I don't like to deal with it when I'm at the bank or the brokerage, but Friday night, it's alright with me. I don't begrudge their them identities. However, it's a weak, unopinionated protocol. No inline images? Just because you support them doesn't mean they don't exist. Users will have their inline images, and they will build clients, and the protocol will be defined. If not by you, then by someone else. That is the story of the modern web, and that is, funny enough, how we got here. Nostalgia isn't productive. A new protocol isn't insurmountable, but it has to be native to the time you are living in. You don't need to necessarily inline videos and graphics, but you need to define how these should be handled, or at the very least, the boundaries of the protocol. Waxing whimsically at people creating readers to handle inline images in an ad hoc way... lol, why? Why are they doing this?! They were just bemoaning the current state of the web! My god, have some foresight! Make a protocol, make a browser, define the boundaries and perhaps adjacent protocols, set your browser roadmap accordingly. Stop when you feel the coverage of the desired space is sufficient. If that's text-only, fine. But you must have answers to how an image or video should be served to the good people of this community.
  • peteyboy 6y ago
    The thing is, when the web grew up, there was no not-web. Gemini occupies a swim lane, and if you want more, even a gemini page can link to a web page to do the heavy lifting of the modern web. So aside from making the bear dance, there's little interesting in forcing inline images. It will be not that the bear dances well, but that it dances at all, right? There is definitely a part of the Gemini community--from what I've seen--that is really excited to see the http 0.9 grow up that they missed the first time. But so far cooler heads are using their persuasion to knock most of that urge down. What will save gemini from turning into the modern web is that the modern web will be right there the whole time. I guess the perverse server and client could collude to deform the gemini protocol to look like http, but why? "=> http://www.mysite/recipe-with-inline-images/ http://www.mysite/recipe-with-inline-images/ Step by step recipes " in your .gmi file would do this so much better.
• ryankrage77 6y ago
  Just make a regular old HTTP(S) site. You can host plain text files and they'll work just fine in any modern browser. Or you can use a subset of HTML and CSS for accessibilty reasons (screen readers, etc).
• jeffmcmahan 6y ago
  I see a lot of comments expressing that all we need is markdown plus this or that little bit. I think that's unreasonable. It might suit Joe developer just fine for reading blogs and news, but the world benefits enormously from the ability to build complex software applications at low cost. Imagine the alternative: Welcome to Mario's Pizza - you can order right from your own computer after we mail a disc* to your house (*requires Windows 8 or newer)! Also, some of the CSS and JS hatred is piffle. Publishers absolutely abuse these languages and it gets pretty bad on news websites especially. But I do not find that most or even many of the sites I visit perform badly on my hardware (2016 iPhone SE and a 2017 MBP). They work fine. Moreover, I appreciate nicely designed and competently implemented experiences on the modern web. I have no interest in trading the modern web - warts and all - for some spartan plaintext utopia.
• Beegle 6y ago
  I agree with some of your thoughts and thank you for putting this together. In order for this to be successful (and I truly wish it becomes so; I very much miss the internet before the web sometimes), it needs to work side by side with http. By that, I mean your web browser needs to become a ‘dual’ browser and be able to switch back and forth between the two seamlessly and documents built for the two protocols need to be able to link back and forth between the two protocols. If a browser can do that, my question then becomes, is it even worth it or fo we just need more web sites out there that focus on their text and their usability?
  • peteyboy 6y ago
    there are gateways if all you want is to peek into gemini web, as several people have noted. How does that ruin anything?
• maitredusoi 6y ago
  I still don't understand the point of this project. I mean QUIC is here, waiting for us. Why throwing away 30 years of HTTP ideas . If images and cookies are to be forbid that should be made from the web developper decision. Choosing Gemini is like accepting restriction by law. I feel like this is old behaviour, that confidence and responsability is the way forward. In a way Gemini could have been published by writer of European Union , North Korea or Soviet Union laws, I can't belive this is a US products, as it contains too much to liberty constrain ;)
  • tenebrisalietum 6y ago
    > If images and cookies are to be forbid that should be made from the web developper decision. Unfortunately even today that's not 100% under your control. I don't have to accept cookies nor load images from your site with the proper settings or browser. You seem to be forgetting HTTP is a user-initiated protocol and while a lot of it is hidden behind Javascript and common browser features, ultimately it's the user agent that initiates everything. You as a web developer can only control the files on your webserver, put cookies in headers (which the user agent has to send back to you) and possibly take advantage of some other Javascript features like DOM storage (which I can turn off). I'm 100% on board with Gemini being a 'liberty constrain' for those who put information online - honestly it's not necessary for remote systems to be executing code on my system just to display text. Yes, you can't monetize it as easily. That's a feature, not a bug, for a user like me.
• rs23296008n1 6y ago
  Pity the client scripting thing is absent. Then again, which script would you use? The overall web itself is going WASM for a lot of projects. Pure javscript that is actually readable isn't exactly common now either as more frameworks build multiple layers on top. I see this as an interesting step sideways. Less is more and all that. Perhaps check in 2 years from now and see what major shifts it caused.
• Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
  Hey, no tables, even basic? If this protocol is to be like 'library', instead of a 'mall', it definitely should have tables.
  • flatlanderwoman 6y ago
    Even Markdown hasn't sorted this out yet though. CommonMark currently has no tables, it's up to other markdown dialects to add it. Related discussion: https://talk.commonmark.org/t/tables-in-pure-markdown/81 https://talk.commonmark.org/t/tables-in-pure-markdown/81
    • Andrew_nenakhov 6y ago
      Well, html had it sorted out three decades ago...
• carapace 6y ago
  Gemini is awesome and fun. Sure, it's kind of a toy, but's that's kind of the point. Go read the mailing list. Implement a client in your favorite language, or that weird language you've been wanting to try... Write a blog, or some fan fiction, or a screed or some poetry. (There's a choose-your-own-adventure you can play.) Have fun with it.
• gray_-_wolf 6y ago
  One thing I don't agree with the protocol (on technical level) is that absent of content-length or of some end-of-message marker. > The server closes the connection after the final byte, there is no "end of response" signal like gopher's lonely dot. This just seems like a bad idea, especially if one is on shitty connection.
  • UIZealot 6y ago
    I share your concern. Since the response body is not encoded, there's no safe end-of-response marker byte(s) to use. So content-length seems like the way to go. But knowing content-length ahead of time is difficult for dynamically generated content (CGI is supported after all), so they also need something similar to HTTP chunked encoding, which does complicate things a little. I understand that keeping the Gemini client simple to implement is one of their design goals, but I don't think the same is true for the Gemini server. So I hope that they would consider adding these to the protocol. They could probably stuff the content-length or the word "chunked" in the <META> string.
    • gray_-_wolf 6y ago
      But since they explicitely state that it is not suitable for large content, server could just cache it until it has it all. Most clients will likely wait for whole response anyway. I feel like that would strike reasonable balance. Client are still simple (arguably more simple since they don't have to guess if they got everything) and the protocol is still trivial. For dynamic content, it would increase time-to-first-byte and ram usage on server, but both imho would not be an issue for the type of content gemini aims for.
      • UIZealot 6y ago
        I agree that always sending content-length would be ideal, if it didn't come with the extra work and costs on the server that you mentioned. Chunked encoding is simple enough to implement, avoids all those issues, and would allow a Gemini server to serve more requests faster given the same resources, or to run on hardware with more limited resources such as embedded. So I think it's well worth the slight cost in simplicity.
• bborud 6y ago
  Call me a cynic, but isn't Gemini like HTTP before it grew any of the features that made HTTP useful? I don't get it.
  • toby 6y ago
    You're pretty much correct. Even in this thread there are people saying "oh the Gemini browser can decide whether to render inline images", which is exactly what Mosaic did. The main advantage this has is that it will not get popular enough to experience the scope creep that the web did so will probably remain relatively pure.
• thayne 6y ago
  I think this might be too simple. In particular, the absence of a way for the client to specify a desired language or supported mime types, query strings as the only way for the client to send data (what about uploads? Or non-idempotentent requests like registration?),and the absence of compression all seem to go a little too far to me (compression could be done using a parameter to the mime type). And really,why replace http? The complaint seems to be mostly with html, so why not just makr a gemini text format,build some browsers that use that as the default instead of html and specify semantics for how tls works, like custom status codes to request a client certificate and recommend TOFU certificate trust. And maybe specify certain headers that shouldn't be used, like cookie.
  • flatlanderwoman 6y ago
    The intention isn't to replace HTTP entirely. By using an incompatible protocol, a hard line is drawn.
• deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
• nojs 6y ago
  I foresee a familiar cycle playing out: 1. Gemini is great, no spam and commercial crap 2. Someone realises it would be great to have simple inline images, and makes a cool client that supports “gemini+img” syntax that they make up. The syntax gracefully degrades, so you can use it in your docs even if your users aren’t using the new browser! 3. Protocol is technically text-only but in reality everyone uses img-enabled browser 4. Repeat with basic styling, then simple scripts. Eventually authors rely on more and more “optional” features and syntax extensions, and we end up with a similar feature set to what we have today. 5. Advertisers move in as Gemini gains mainstream adoption, and we’re back to www
• perryizgr8 6y ago
  > Gemini, being a recent protocol, mandates the use of TLS. There is no unencrypted version of Gemini available. Mandating the reliance on third parties in the protocol itself does not seem to be a great choice. If I have a simple webpage which I use as a daily diary, why should I go to the trouble of asking a random third party to provide me with a certificate?
  • vertex-four 6y ago
    Gemini does SSH-style TOFU, you don't ask a third party for the certificate. From the spec: "Clients can validate TLS connections however they like (including not at all) but the strongly RECOMMENDED approach is to implement a lightweight "TOFU" certificate-pinning system which treats self-signed certificates as first- class citizens."