4 ms·

Neither Gopher nor Gemini are remotely close to being a replacement for the web, as neither support anything close to rich text or media. Gemini doesn't allow

• Seirdy 6y ago
  > Gemini doesn't allow for embedding images in web pages - which makes it vastly inferior to the web for any kind of interesting documents. This statement is incorrect. Gemini clients can absolutely display inline images. The difference is that default behavior is to require a user action to load a resource. An image can be a link, but when a user clicks that link it can turn into an inline image. This is how clients like Lagrange work. In other words, inline images can have delayed loading. If a user understands the consequences (tracking, network usage) of doing so, this behavior can be changed to load images by default; however, authors should not expect users to do this and should write their documents accordingly. Personally, I prefer a document to not have inline images; my gemini client opens images in my default image viewer instead. My window manager makes my age viewer float above other windows by default. This way, images "pop out" into a separate window that I can keep viewing as I scroll down in a document; I never have to scroll up to look at the last image. > Imagine reading a research paper where, in order to view figures and equations, you had to follow a link to a separate object. No font control. No two-column layout. No anchors to allow you to jump to sections of the document. These are all client-side features. Half the point of Gemini is for the user agent to determine presentation and leave semantic markup to authors. I don't want weird fonts or multi-column views, but you do; Gemini lets us both get what we want instead of having everyone see a one-size-fits-all presentation. Clients like Kristall even give you a TOC in the sidebar. > Gemini and Gemtext actively inhibit learning and knowledge dissemination by obsessing over pure plain text, which is bad at those things. Text is the only form of communication that can be understood by the sighted, blind, deaf, and machine (translation, etc) while being stored and transmitted without information loss. Text is good at knowledge dissemination.
  • fouric 6y ago
    > This statement is incorrect. Gemini clients can absolutely display inline images. "clients" and "can" - it's not mandated by the spec, therefore, "Gemini" does not do it. > The difference is that default behavior is to require a user action to load a resource. Extremely non-conductive to thought. Again, take the example of a research paper - the difference between having every figure and formula appear by default and having to click-to-load is massive, with the latter being un-ergonomic and inhibiting comprehension and flow. > These are all client-side features. Half the point of Gemini is for the user agent to determine presentation and leave semantic markup to authors. I don't want weird fonts or multi-column views, but you do; Gemini lets us both get what we want instead of having everyone see a one-size-fits-all presentation. Clients like Kristall even give you a TOC in the sidebar. You can do exactly this same thing with the modern web with CSS styling and userscripts - the difference being that the web gives you saner defaults that are more conducive to thought, and Gemini clients seem to give you less-sane defaults that are less conducive to thought. > blind, deaf This is a limitation of being blind or deaf - someone who's blind wouldn't be able to view a sunset in real life. Obviously, though, while text can be read/listened to by someone who's blind or deaf, that doesn't make text a replacement for images, formulas, or interactive animations - those with those disabilities simply can't perceive the native forms of those things. Several hundred or thousand words describing a layout for a PCB is not equivalent with an image of the layout. ...and, modern webtech has accessibility properties that allow for annotation of non-text media with text. Gemini? Does not. > machine (translation, etc) False. Machines cannot understand plain text - it must be parsed. English (and other natural languages) are not machine-parseable, and machine-readable plain text had no reason to not exist as structured data in the first place. > while being stored and transmitted without information loss. All of the other kinds of electronic data that exist in the modern web can also be stored and transmitted without information loss, so this is not a special property. > Text is good at knowledge dissemination. Relative to text+formulas+images+interactive visualizations? Absolutely false. Show me how to write out all of the variants of the Schrödinger Equation[1] in plain text, while still making it as readable, understandable, and useful as the mathematical formulas. Show me how to phrase, in words, a 3D circuit layout, such that it's easier to understand and manipulate than an interactive model. Show me how to describe the sound of a violin. Webtech gives you text and images and sound and formulas and interactivity. Gemini gives you text, and that's it. Having to click a separate link to go to a separate object makes it not "part of Gemini" and the user experience is clearly, massively worse. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schr%C3%B6dinger_equation