4 ms·

Main problem of Gemini is that it's read-only, by design. The author of the protocol didn't want to add forms etc, as that adds complexity; but as a result, th

Main problem of Gemini is that it's read-only, by design. The author of the protocol didn't want to add forms etc, as that adds complexity; but as a result, there is no way to write things. There are no discussions or a way to create "pods" without going back to some other protocol. I think as a result, most content of Gemini is talking about how Gemini is great and nothing much else.

smitty1e 5y ago
So we need to move the transaction management for the connection out of the document and into a conversation. A transaction looks like an email conversation, with server response containing enough metadata to generate a new request to some endpoint that can process it. The next request to the Gemini page will need to have some GUID to locate the conversation and obtain the latest version. This sounds like something that might not be too insane over a VPN, where one owns the whole conversation. Otherwise, it could be fraught with peril.
cpdean 5y ago
what you cite as a bug feels like a refreshing feature to me. Looking at how the Lagrange [1] client interprets Gemini shows how rich and enjoyable Gemini can be, and it leaves me optimistic that we could browse it in the future on something like an ereader. The constraints that it imposes makes it so the author is encouraged to write text, not a website. This doesn't have to reproduce the entire suite of features that a modern web application offers. [1] https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/
- zamadatix 5y ago
  Aren't e-readers perfectly able to display e.g. MD over HTTP on existing clients instead of gemtext over Gemini on a one off client? Or even gemtext without it being over Gemini or a dedicated client? Similarly how does being incapable of doing something enhance just not doing that something? I get Gemini as a way to form a clique of like minded people who know of it but I don't get Gemini as enabling anything that couldn't or wasn't already being done before.
  - octoberfranklin 5y ago
    Gemini takes a while to appreciate. The first step is realizing that it was deliberately designed to be inextensible. Anything that can be extended will accrue bloat. The second step is to realize that it's really just plain text. Once you realize that, the choices about what kinds of formatting make total sense: * bulleted lists, but not hierarchical * links but they have to be in a paragraph of their own * preformatted blocks but no italics * linewrapping but no collapsing of multiple sequential linebreaks * headings but no boldface * blockquote with > just like email (*are you listening, @dang?*) They're the kinds of formatting that impose zero burden on somebody reading through a terminal. In fact, linewrapping is really the only thing you need to do to gemtext to make it readable (versus just "cat foo.gemini"). Rich clients like Lagrange then take this limited set and render it as beautifully as possible on something much more powerful than a VT100. In a way, this is just an extension of the "first step". If you start allowing rich markup, where do you stop? Not allowing anything that would make the markup itself any less readable provides a natural point at which to halt extensibility, for principled reasons. I recently discovered that Lagrange will treat a link to an image as a lazily-loaded inline image -- you have to click the link to make the image appear, but it appears inline where the link had been instead of replacing the page that linked to it. I think this is a really beautiful way to enhance the experience for people reading through a GUI without tempting authors to do anything that would burden people who are reading through a terminal. The only big wart on the whole thing is TLS. It's cute that it solves the TCP truncation problem, but that's a lot of bloat to pay in return. I guess there isn't yet something at Layer 4 that is as minimal, elegant, and battle-tested as wireguard (Layer 3) to take the place of TLS though.
    - ksec 5y ago
      >They're the kinds of formatting that impose zero burden on somebody reading through a terminal. Interesting. From a modern Web POV a lot of these are backwards, but if you look at it from terminal and other usage it is quite refreshing.
  - cpdean 5y ago
    You are correct, ereaders have supported viewing the web for years, but it has been a miserable experience since the beginning. * Inline links everywhere tempting you to click away to a new page, both fracturing your attention as well as being a multiple-second delay between pages * Images are everywhere, needing to be interpreted by the rendering engine of the ereader either with a simple monochromatic threshold to figure out what parts of the fully color image are black and white, or if you're lucky it has some way to re-process the image through dithering so that it's possible to see what it is * web layouts always wanting you to have a screen larger than an ereader can support, so you're stuck scrolling back and forth on a tiny screen that already has a miserable refresh rate of once or twice a second. * the web is an application platform now, the vast majority of its features just not fitting within what an ereader can support You're all correct, you can easily implement what Gemini does if you make one website that is only text. In fact, you can probably do it better since you don't have to be constrained to gemtext, or constrained to its handful of weekend-project servers for hosting the site, all of which have their own issues. But the thing that keeps drawing me back to is is that while you can easily implement Gemini with HTML and HTTP, it is impossible to implement HTML and HTTP in Gemini. The fact that you can't implement a webapp in Gemini means that if you're browsing pages in Gemini, you get a consistent experience and every site is clean and respectful of the experience (whether the author wanted to respect it or not, they have no choice). Perhaps the real counter-argument to Gemini is not "why don't website authors just make their websites simpler?" but instead "why don't modern browsers run in 'reader mode' by default?".
- apatters 5y ago
  Lagrange is very good. It seems I can't set a custom homepage URL, I hope he adds that at some point. Can anyone recommend a good de facto homepage as a jumping off point for exploring what's out there on Gemini today? There are a few decent directory sites but in particular it would be nice to find a page with links to new or updated sites.
  - gerikson 5y ago
    I use Antenna: => gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/ Note: anyone can submit an RSS/Atom feed to Antenna, but submissions from Techrights.org and Kiwi Farms are blocked by default.
  - skyjake 5y ago
    At the moment, you can set one or more homepages via bookmarks: right-click on a bookmark and select "Use as Homepage".
t-3 5y ago
That's... not really true. The spec clearly allows for user input.
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  Section 3.2.1: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html
- shp0ngle 5y ago
  Yes, for a simple, singular query, like a search. It's not meant to be a longer (or more structured) input. There are "message boards" that hack around it and try to make it a text input, and it feels like that, a hack.
tenebrisalietum 5y ago
The solution to "Gemini doesn't do X" is "make a client that does X". For example: a combination Gemini/IRC client would be pretty neat. Gemini documents can include IRC discussion links and open right up in the same client. A lot of the early HTTP-based web was read-only - I mean how many Geocities pages were there in the mid-90's with nothing more interactive than emails and maybe little things like a guest book or whatever.
- RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
  Agreed. In general, composing together simple standards seems a far better option than trying to organically expand e.g. web standards to handle everything under the sun.

smitty1e 5y ago

So we need to move the transaction management for the connection out of the document and into a conversation. A transaction looks like an email conversation, with server response containing enough metadata to generate a new request to some endpoint that can process it. The next request to the Gemini page will need to have some GUID to locate the conversation and obtain the latest version. This sounds like something that might not be too insane over a VPN, where one owns the whole conversation. Otherwise, it could be fraught with peril.

cpdean 5y ago

what you cite as a bug feels like a refreshing feature to me. Looking at how the Lagrange [1] client interprets Gemini shows how rich and enjoyable Gemini can be, and it leaves me optimistic that we could browse it in the future on something like an ereader. The constraints that it imposes makes it so the author is encouraged to write text, not a website. This doesn't have to reproduce the entire suite of features that a modern web application offers. [1] https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/ https://gmi.skyjake.fi/lagrange/

zamadatix 5y ago
Aren't e-readers perfectly able to display e.g. MD over HTTP on existing clients instead of gemtext over Gemini on a one off client? Or even gemtext without it being over Gemini or a dedicated client? Similarly how does being incapable of doing something enhance just not doing that something? I get Gemini as a way to form a clique of like minded people who know of it but I don't get Gemini as enabling anything that couldn't or wasn't already being done before.
- octoberfranklin 5y ago
  Gemini takes a while to appreciate. The first step is realizing that it was deliberately designed to be inextensible. Anything that can be extended will accrue bloat. The second step is to realize that it's really just plain text. Once you realize that, the choices about what kinds of formatting make total sense: * bulleted lists, but not hierarchical * links but they have to be in a paragraph of their own * preformatted blocks but no italics * linewrapping but no collapsing of multiple sequential linebreaks * headings but no boldface * blockquote with > just like email (*are you listening, @dang?*) They're the kinds of formatting that impose zero burden on somebody reading through a terminal. In fact, linewrapping is really the only thing you need to do to gemtext to make it readable (versus just "cat foo.gemini"). Rich clients like Lagrange then take this limited set and render it as beautifully as possible on something much more powerful than a VT100. In a way, this is just an extension of the "first step". If you start allowing rich markup, where do you stop? Not allowing anything that would make the markup itself any less readable provides a natural point at which to halt extensibility, for principled reasons. I recently discovered that Lagrange will treat a link to an image as a lazily-loaded inline image -- you have to click the link to make the image appear, but it appears inline where the link had been instead of replacing the page that linked to it. I think this is a really beautiful way to enhance the experience for people reading through a GUI without tempting authors to do anything that would burden people who are reading through a terminal. The only big wart on the whole thing is TLS. It's cute that it solves the TCP truncation problem, but that's a lot of bloat to pay in return. I guess there isn't yet something at Layer 4 that is as minimal, elegant, and battle-tested as wireguard (Layer 3) to take the place of TLS though.
  - ksec 5y ago
    >They're the kinds of formatting that impose zero burden on somebody reading through a terminal. Interesting. From a modern Web POV a lot of these are backwards, but if you look at it from terminal and other usage it is quite refreshing.
- cpdean 5y ago
  You are correct, ereaders have supported viewing the web for years, but it has been a miserable experience since the beginning. * Inline links everywhere tempting you to click away to a new page, both fracturing your attention as well as being a multiple-second delay between pages * Images are everywhere, needing to be interpreted by the rendering engine of the ereader either with a simple monochromatic threshold to figure out what parts of the fully color image are black and white, or if you're lucky it has some way to re-process the image through dithering so that it's possible to see what it is * web layouts always wanting you to have a screen larger than an ereader can support, so you're stuck scrolling back and forth on a tiny screen that already has a miserable refresh rate of once or twice a second. * the web is an application platform now, the vast majority of its features just not fitting within what an ereader can support You're all correct, you can easily implement what Gemini does if you make one website that is only text. In fact, you can probably do it better since you don't have to be constrained to gemtext, or constrained to its handful of weekend-project servers for hosting the site, all of which have their own issues. But the thing that keeps drawing me back to is is that while you can easily implement Gemini with HTML and HTTP, it is impossible to implement HTML and HTTP in Gemini. The fact that you can't implement a webapp in Gemini means that if you're browsing pages in Gemini, you get a consistent experience and every site is clean and respectful of the experience (whether the author wanted to respect it or not, they have no choice). Perhaps the real counter-argument to Gemini is not "why don't website authors just make their websites simpler?" but instead "why don't modern browsers run in 'reader mode' by default?".
apatters 5y ago
Lagrange is very good. It seems I can't set a custom homepage URL, I hope he adds that at some point. Can anyone recommend a good de facto homepage as a jumping off point for exploring what's out there on Gemini today? There are a few decent directory sites but in particular it would be nice to find a page with links to new or updated sites.
- gerikson 5y ago
  I use Antenna: => gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/ Note: anyone can submit an RSS/Atom feed to Antenna, but submissions from Techrights.org and Kiwi Farms are blocked by default.
- skyjake 5y ago
  At the moment, you can set one or more homepages via bookmarks: right-click on a bookmark and select "Use as Homepage".

t-3 5y ago

That's... not really true. The spec clearly allows for user input.

octoberfranklin 5y ago
Section 3.2.1: https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.html
shp0ngle 5y ago
Yes, for a simple, singular query, like a search. It's not meant to be a longer (or more structured) input. There are "message boards" that hack around it and try to make it a text input, and it feels like that, a hack.

tenebrisalietum 5y ago

The solution to "Gemini doesn't do X" is "make a client that does X". For example: a combination Gemini/IRC client would be pretty neat. Gemini documents can include IRC discussion links and open right up in the same client. A lot of the early HTTP-based web was read-only - I mean how many Geocities pages were there in the mid-90's with nothing more interactive than emails and maybe little things like a guest book or whatever.

RodgerTheGreat 5y ago
Agreed. In general, composing together simple standards seems a far better option than trying to organically expand e.g. web standards to handle everything under the sun.