6 ms·

As someone rooting for [NetSurf](https://www.netsurf-browser.org/ https://www.netsurf-browser.org/) (and any other remaining independent browser engines) to sur

• Mediterraneo10 6y ago
  Gemini’s standard is missing several important means of semantic tagging that screenreaders need to properly deal with content. I feel that if we are going to replace HTML, we still need to ensure that the disabled are first-class citizens from day one of whatever new standard we use.
  • skyfaller 6y ago
    Yes, I agree accessibility is a vital concern that needs to be fully addressed before Gemini is finalized. Here are some posts I found using this Gemini search engine: gemini://geminispace.info/ - gemini://tilde.team/~tomasino/journal/20200601-accessibility.gmi - gemini://gemini.marmaladefoo.com/blog/7-Sep-2020_Parsing_preformatted_alt_text.gmi - gemini://ebc.li/posts/alt-text-proposal.gmi You can run them through the Gemini web portal if you don't have a Gemini client yet: https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/ https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/
  • nonbirithm 6y ago
    I think this is an interesting point. Now that nearly everyone uses the Internet, the bar for accessibility and the accompanying workload for implementing it is considerably higher than what it was in the 90's. There probably weren't as many accessibility advocates back then. But accessibility is still crucial to have from a modern standpoint.
    • gostsamo 6y ago
      Actually, back then html was just a document format. Something to read. Alt tags were the biggest issue. Flash and js brought hidden controls and unannounced behavior trying to reproduce the native desktop controls that had accessibility build in.
  • caslon 6y ago
    HTML already isn't meaningfully accessible. Gemini will still be an upgrade, because there's much less to spam screenreaders with, by virtue of being effectively just a hyperlinked document layer. I think accessibility is critically-important, too, but acting like it's something required for success (however you define success) is denying the existence of the platform Gemini's already trying to supplant.
    • saagarjha 6y ago
      Plain HTML is fairly accessible, I’m not sure what you mean?
      • caslon 6y ago
        Plain HTML has a million attributes, isn't actually what any website is made of (this one even has spacer gifs), and isn't actually used in a semantic fashion by anyone (find me a page using <summary> and I'll show you a page that was sued into using it). Gemini has two elements (link, text), and is much more accessible. I love HTML, and I write my own sites to be accessible. I've used a screenreader, though, and can definitively say: every bit of computing sucks for the blind.
      • shakna 6y ago
        Because of the highly nested structure of HTML, it is possible to crash (from experience, with all the big names) your screenreader if there are a large number of elements, especially if there are a large number of sub-trees, like you often find in technical documentation. HTML is accessible in theory... But in the real world, it can still be a terrible experience, unless the reader is highly optimised for streaming the HTML (not always possible), or the document is simple.
    • kevingadd 6y ago
      "As of 2012, 4.2 million Americans aged 40 years and older suffer from uncorrectable vision impairment, out of which 1.02 million who are blind; this number is predicted to more than double by 2050 to 8.96 million due to the increasing epidemics of diabetes and other chronic diseases and our rapidly aging U.S. population." "Approximately 6.8% of children younger than 18 years in the United States have a diagnosed eye and vision condition. Nearly 3 percent of children younger than 18 years are blind or visually impaired, defined as having trouble seeing even when wearing glasses or contact lenses." Any definition of success that intentionally excludes tens of millions of users (even people who aren't completely blind may need the aid of a screen-reader) is a very questionable definition.
  • biryani_chicken 6y ago
    Isn't Gemini mostly text and a single structure for documents? How is that not good for screenreaders?
    • Mediterraneo10 6y ago
      For example, Gemini lacks language markup so that you can tell the screenreader to pronounce a quoted foreign word(s) in the correct language instead giving it a mangled mispronunciation in the document's default language. In HTML this is done by using span or div tags with lang="XX".
• ChrisSD 6y ago
  Many sites require JavaScript even if they don't really need it. Users won't use a no script browser because it locks them out of much of the web. Heck even web savy people find it too annoying to use the noscript addon.
  • skyfaller 6y ago
    But if supporting Javascript kills all independent browsers, wouldn't it be better to have some alternative than no alternative? Supporting a Javascript-less document-based web may be an alternative to creating an entirely separate ecosystem like Gemini. It's probably doomed as a compromise that pleases no one, but it might be worth a shot.
    • ChrisSD 6y ago
      Sure, I'm definitely not going to argue against some making the effort. And I don't want to sound too fatalistic. I just don't see a way for an alternative to be anything other than a tiny niche of like minded users. Which isn't bad in itself but it's also not really a true alternative. It's a fun extra, not a replacement. Can I use my government's website in a noscript browser? Can I buy from online shops? Can I use social media? Can I read my preferred news site?
• blacktriangle 6y ago
  Funny this is the second reference to Gemini I've seen on HN today after only learning about it last week. The notion that Gemini is the best hope for a simpler global scale hypermedia library that individuals can contribute and manage, not to mention actually develop clients for, seems reasonable. For better or worse, the web is now an application development platform with two relevant implementations and zero hope of a third one arising. While not a perfect platform, its good enough. Maybe its time to accept this is what the web has become and let something like Gemini be the do-over that's focused purely on the role of globally connected hypermedia.
• rvense 6y ago
  I think there's a simpler, better solution than Gemini, that is Markdown over HTTP. Accept: text/markdown,text/plain;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.1 I would love to see support for this in blogging engines. (Inspired by https://jcs.org/2021/01/06/plaintext https://jcs.org/2021/01/06/plaintext)
  • kevingadd 6y ago
    The lack of a consistent standard for Markdown is a big obstacle for this. Markdown comes in various "flavors" so you end up with a quirks mode nightmare as bad as IE6-era HTML, if not worse, and you sacrifice expressiveness as part of the bargain.
    • nerdponx 6y ago
      Hopefully the industry will continue standardizing on Commonmark. Maybe it should have its own media type? Accept: text/commonmark,text/markdown,text/plain
      • spc476 6y ago
        If you go by RFC-7763 and RFC-7764, then CommonMark would be served as: text/markdown;variant=CommonMark
        • nerdponx 6y ago
          I didn't know about "variant=", thanks.
    • donatj 6y ago
      Potentially unpopular opinion, but GitHub flavored marked down is almost inarguably the de facto standard, and the vast majority of markdown in existence is GitHub flavored. We should just embrace this.
      • chipotle_coyote 6y ago
• pabs3 6y ago
  IIRC NetSurf already supports JavaScript, using the Duktape library.
  • skyfaller 6y ago
    Their website says JavaScript support is "primitive and incomplete" and disabled by default: https://www.netsurf-browser.org/documentation/info.html#JavaScript https://www.netsurf-browser.org/documentation/info.html#Java... My point is that they should not even attempt Javascript support, I think they should just drop it completely and focus their limited development efforts elsewhere.
• fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  I sort of wonder how hard it would be to use Babel for your JavaScript engine: implement ES3 or ES5 and then just use Babel to transform incoming JS to what you support. It doesn’t solve the API problem directly, but many APIs have decent polyfills.
• matkoniecz 6y ago
  > wonder if they'd be better off not supporting Javascript at all and simply focusing on good support for modern HTML and CSS, so it can at least be used to read documents. from article > For better or for worse, web browsers' primary role is no longer to view documents; it is to view applications that, by sheer coincidence, sometimes resemble documents. You can make workarounds to gracefully degrade where we have missing HTML or DOM features, but JavaScript is pretty much run or don't, and more and more sites just plain collapse if any portion of it doesn't.
  • eitland 6y ago
    I still want a web browser that support inline images (i.e. as far as I understand, not gopher-based) but lightening fast and not running random scripts on behalf of 500 - 1000 entities. Oh, and those entities may change at any time. I think there is room for a html browser with no js (or an intentionally limited one).
• thrwaeasddsaf 6y ago
  Gemini may unfortunately be the best hope in terms of what gets adoption but I feel like it swings way too far in the other direction. I see this a lot: your choices are either massively obese or minimalist to a fault. Where is the middle ground? From an engineering perspective, I think that is the most interesting area: designing something that is small and simple yet surprisingly capable. That is also what I want from software as a user. I think Gemini goes in the "weekend project" category whereas a modern browser is more like hundreds of man-years. I evaluated Gemini, wanted to like it, almost like it, but I think it just doesn't allow me to do what I want to do. It is too simple. I think it should be possible to design something that is more flexible, yet for which a competent programmer can write a basic client implementation in a few weekends (with some features missing but the client still being entirely usable), make it feature-complete in an additional dozen weekends or so, and also add & finish all the extras and fluff and polish over the remaining year. From there on it's maintenance and bugfixes and minor features which can be worked on as a hobby by a small group without having to devote all their lives to it. These projects are also small enough that if someone's not happy, they can fork and customize (and still be able to "keep up" with whatever developments might happen in terms of standardised functionality).
  • skyfaller 6y ago
    How would you propose achieving a middle ground? Anything in the middle will still have to have a lot of features, and once you have a lot of features, how do you hold the line and prevent people from adding more features until it is just the absurdly complex modern web-as-operating-system again? The reason Gemini is so simple is not simply to keep it simple enough that anyone can write their own client or server, although that is certainly one goal. A big reason it is so simple is a general policy of rejecting new features, and that minimalism may be necessary to prevent scope creep.
    • thrwaeasddsaf 6y ago
      If you think scope creep is an inevitable consequence of not making a protocol non-extensible, I have a thousand RFCs to show you.. Really you just need to outline some goals and rules and have the right people at the top calling the shots. Plenty of things are designed and developed with a conservative mindset where adding new features has to be very carefully justified. I'd also like to point out that it's worthwhile to think of the complexity of all the systems you require, and not just one protocol/document format. Gemini may be simple, but when it is too simple, you will need a different protocol or format. So now you have two, with somewhat overlapping functionality that you can't merge if you insist on keeping everything absolutely minimalist. Only two isn't going to be enough.. so if you're willing to do what you do, complexity is inevitable, whether it is in a single protocol or spread across a clusterfuck of dozens of protocols. Again, it is good engineering and good abstraction to find a solution that gives a lot of bang for buck, i.e. is reasonably simple yet covers multiple bases.