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Ah, but just for completeness, despite my own fondness for the idea of a markdown-web, their faq states: > 2.9 Why didn't you just use Markdown instead of defi

by kixiQu 5y ago

Ah, but just for completeness, despite my own fondness for the idea of a markdown-web, their faq states: > 2.9 Why didn't you just use Markdown instead of defining text/gemini? > The text/gemini markup borrows heavily from Markdown, which might prompt some people to wonder "Why not just use Markdown as the default media type for Gemini? Sure, it's complicated to implement, but like TLS there are plenty of libraries available in all the major languages". Reasons not to go down this route include: > There are actually many subtly different and incompatible variants of Markdown in existence, so unlike TLS all the different libraries are not guaranteed to behave similarly. > The vast majority of Markdown libraries don't actually do anything more than convert Markdown to HTML, which for a Gemini client is a needless intermediary format which is heavier than the original! > Many Markdown variants permit features which were not wanted for Gemini, e.g. inline images. > A desire to preserve Gopher's requirement of "one link per line" on the grounds that it encourages extremely clear site designs. > Of course, it is possible to serve Markdown over Gemini. The inclusion of a text/markdown Media type in the response header will allow more advanced clients to support it. My experience of Gemini's "one link per line" deal has not suggested it leads to "extremely clear site designs", but I'm also not a Gopher person so maybe I'm missing The Paradigm.

kelnos 5y ago
The argument seems to boil down to "these other formats have many variants or features that we don't want, so we're going to invent something new". That... just does not make sense. I get that they admit that they do borrow heavily from Markdown, but there's no reason why they can't pick features from Markdown (including inline links and images), put them in their spec, and still call it "gemtext". The real reason they don't do this is right there: they don't want to. They decided on a weak set of features, leaving out things that most people probably would find useful, and that's that. I do understand the desire to limit features and extensibility, to avoid Gemini turning into the mess that is the current state of web standards, not to mention the attractiveness of being able to cut off ads and tracking by design. But I agree with OP that they're going about it in a way that all but guarantees they will not be particularly successful. Telling users they can't have inline links or images, and telling developers their creativity in implementation is severely limited isn't going to make you many friends. And maybe that's also by design. If they want to recreate the internet of the 80s and early 90s, including the "feature" that a very tiny percentage of humanity was on it, maybe this really is the way to do it. I wish them well, but I don't think this would be an ecosystem that would give me joy (no judgment, and I'm sure the Gemini folks don't care, and that's all fine).

by kixiQu 5y ago

kelnos 5y ago

The argument seems to boil down to "these other formats have many variants or features that we don't want, so we're going to invent something new". That... just does not make sense. I get that they admit that they do borrow heavily from Markdown, but there's no reason why they can't pick features from Markdown (including inline links and images), put them in their spec, and still call it "gemtext". The real reason they don't do this is right there: they don't want to. They decided on a weak set of features, leaving out things that most people probably would find useful, and that's that. I do understand the desire to limit features and extensibility, to avoid Gemini turning into the mess that is the current state of web standards, not to mention the attractiveness of being able to cut off ads and tracking by design. But I agree with OP that they're going about it in a way that all but guarantees they will not be particularly successful. Telling users they can't have inline links or images, and telling developers their creativity in implementation is severely limited isn't going to make you many friends. And maybe that's also by design. If they want to recreate the internet of the 80s and early 90s, including the "feature" that a very tiny percentage of humanity was on it, maybe this really is the way to do it. I wish them well, but I don't think this would be an ecosystem that would give me joy (no judgment, and I'm sure the Gemini folks don't care, and that's all fine).