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People make out fine without a useless protocol, I think. There are still a large number of people creating blogs and websites without analytics etc., and with

by syrrim 5y ago

People make out fine without a useless protocol, I think. There are still a large number of people creating blogs and websites without analytics etc., and with no expectation of being able to monetize their work. As the lobste.rs quote points out, gemini goes a step beyond that, in banning many features that even very minimal websites might want to use. When I think of a minimal website, I think of danluu.com. But even danluu occasionally uses tables and images. https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ . I think these articles would be made worse if these features were removed. I suppose they could be replaced with carefully formatted code blocks, but these would be harder for danluu to make, and would look worse to the reader. Consider the dictum from motherfuckingwebsite.com: "shit works on all devices"; codeblocks work very poorly across devices. I think claiming that gemini is intentionally useless is a bad excuse. Gemini includes some features, but doesn't include others. There needs to be better reasoning behind the fetures it excludes.

selfhoster11 5y ago
> There are still a large number of people creating blogs and websites without analytics etc., and with no expectation of being able to monetize their work. Gemini is a social space as well as a protocol. Part of why it's got such a sharp break with HTTP than e.g. being a subset of HTTP with a special client, is to demarcate such a space for those who want it. Minimal websites still operate within the larger context of the HTTP web, where this demarcation doesn't exist. Click a link to a Facebook profile from that small blog and you've unwittingly chosen to load half a megabyte of markup and tracking scripts. This is not possible with Gemini because such a capability simply is outside the protocol. > But even danluu occasionally uses tables and images. https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ . I think these articles would be made worse if these features were removed. I agree that this could be annoying. Gemini has support for alternate mimetypes, so it's possible to return Markdown to the client. I think that Markdown is still in the spirit of Gemini's minimalism, but it does support more things (including tables). If a particular client refuses to render markdown, it's still readable as plaintext.

by syrrim 5y ago

selfhoster11 5y ago

> There are still a large number of people creating blogs and websites without analytics etc., and with no expectation of being able to monetize their work. Gemini is a social space as well as a protocol. Part of why it's got such a sharp break with HTTP than e.g. being a subset of HTTP with a special client, is to demarcate such a space for those who want it. Minimal websites still operate within the larger context of the HTTP web, where this demarcation doesn't exist. Click a link to a Facebook profile from that small blog and you've unwittingly chosen to load half a megabyte of markup and tracking scripts. This is not possible with Gemini because such a capability simply is outside the protocol. > But even danluu occasionally uses tables and images. https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ . I think these articles would be made worse if these features were removed. I agree that this could be annoying. Gemini has support for alternate mimetypes, so it's possible to return Markdown to the client. I think that Markdown is still in the spirit of Gemini's minimalism, but it does support more things (including tables). If a particular client refuses to render markdown, it's still readable as plaintext.