A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternative to the web

https://toffelblog.xyz/blog/gemini-overview/

created by iamkeyur on 04/07/2020 at 17:06 UTC

64 upvotes, 11 top-level comments (showing 11)

Comments

Comment by trisul-108 at 04/07/2020 at 20:20 UTC

20 upvotes, 0 direct replies

The web was very simple while it just needed to serve documents ... and it still is. It was never intended to be an application front-end, and this is what is making it so complicated. Gemini would have the very same problem.

Simplifying the web for use in the 21st century requires a completely different approach.

Comment by ergotofwhy at 04/07/2020 at 18:49 UTC

13 upvotes, 2 direct replies

I've been thinking about something like this, cool to see someone is already on it.

I think that a gemini browser (or browser plugin for viewing over Gemini protocol) that users set their own css for is a great idea. Server-only code keeps folk more secure (no client side scripts). No cookies, unless the user wants to pre-specify a payload for certain gemini sites.

Loading images should be a user-specific setting, too. Off by default so designers have to consider that.

Might be hard to figure out some stuff like shopping, but i suppose this could just link to the regular web for that?

This would also be good for the blind. Lots of websites have tons of bloat that makes navigation via screen reader really hard

Comment by Shaper_pmp at 05/07/2020 at 01:22 UTC*

11 upvotes, 1 direct replies

What does this new protocol offer that can't already be achieved with HTML/HTTP/existing browsers with client-side stylesheets?

Anyone on the entire internet can turn off images, disable JS and substitute their own CSS reset and user-stylesheet... only (to a first approximation) **no-one does**.

The fact that we universally decided *not* to keep the web that simple and document-focused and instead complicated it with JS and application UIs and similar additions is not a sign the web is broken - it's a sign that Gemini is aiming for a demographic that - empirically! - simply doesn't exist in any significant degree.

Comment by KernowRoger at 04/07/2020 at 17:41 UTC

26 upvotes, 4 direct replies

I really hate the internet nowadays. Some news articles take minutes to load what is essentially a few paragraphs of text. The vast majority of the bloat is styling that isn't needed for reading text at all. Some sites need it for functionality but a lot don't.

Comment by trycat at 05/07/2020 at 01:01 UTC

5 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Weird thing to focus on. The web is a sewer but the size doesn't bother me. And I could cram "sign up for our newsletter" or "subscribe to the Epoch Times" in text format too.

I say make sites bigger, make them crash phones. Use all the things.

Comment by CupCakeArmy at 05/07/2020 at 09:37 UTC

2 upvotes, 2 direct replies

How is this solving stuff? The reason why websites are huge these days is a choice made by developers, not http.

Gemini actively does not recover from network instability??? Ever heard of smartphones? Those things that make you the majority of web traffic.

Also.. only plain text files. Cool, love that Wikipedia diagram that explains it better to me. O wait.. now it's a ASCII picture. Yeah fuck this.

It's a cool thought experiment, but it's so naive to think this would solve the problem or even be a suitable protocol.

Comment by JPYamamoto at 05/07/2020 at 02:27 UTC

1 upvotes, 1 direct replies

I didn't get to experience the internet back in the good ol' days, but I really like the style (or lack of it) that it used to have, at least from what I've seen on the wayback machine and a few websites that have stayed the same over time.

The internet has strayed apart from its original philosophy. It used to be very straightfoward, nowadays it's way too unnecessarily fancy.

And maybe that's not a bad thing. Nowadays pretty much everyone has access to the internet while it didn't use to be that way. And there must be a reason to that.

But still, I can't deny that I wish the internet was a little more like it used to be.

Comment by pavel_lishin at 05/07/2020 at 03:36 UTC

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies

> As time goes on I could imagine some Gemini browsers providing a fancy image viewer for links to images.