Re: What I like and dislike about Gemini

Original Post

Re: Like

> styling is client side

> scripting is server side

> links are on their own lines

> TLS

I agree with all the likes. Its all the parts of SmallWeb that makes it so easy to consume. Especially when you're viewing from a mobile device. Everyone has the same experience.

Re: Neutral

> No inline formatting

I actually don't mind this so much. My choice for all documents I create is Markdown. Unless otherwise needed, I just convert to docx or pdf or html using pandoc rather than actually having to use the tools for those formats. This means most of the time I'm reading my work, its in Markdown. I don't see bold text, I see text wrapped in emphasis.

Gemini goes one step further and just leaves it up to us to view the tone of the writing. It really is going back to old school internet where everything was txt.

Re: Dislike

> it’s an entirely different protocol

This bugged me, but for a slightly different reason. Small Web shouldn't mean inferior web. Reduce the UX all you want but the major leap from Gopher to Web 2.0 is just how interactive both sides of the communication are.

Gemini supports inputs. A line of string input that can take new lines. Thats it. Because of this the UX for this is a popup window with a single line of input and OK/Cancel buttons. There is now mimetype based inputs, no line vs multi lined text distinction. I think this single change could resolve so much.

Back in the early web days we had anonymous ftp. if you wanted to send a file you could log into an account directed by your Gopher client. But there was no session attached to it. With Gemini and cgi you could hack together something where a page loads with session data and makes a link to sftp to allow your upload to be attached to a session but that feels so hacky. This is something Spartan resolved, wish Gemini would have.

Same goes for distinguishing an input line versus a block of text. The clients could key off of the type of text and give you a very different experiences.

Why does this bother me? It feels like the protocol was created for a purpose, and not specifically about a user's need. Simple Web but not thinking about what people might do on there. The fact you have to jump over to HTTP to sign up for midnight.pub means the design is bad. You can't sign up and post a simple ssh cert file?!?

> Protocol limitations such as downloading large files or streaming

I need to try setting up Spartan. I like Gemini for hosting this log, I've posted some stuff that I tag ona Mastodon. The past few days I've been getting close to 1000 daily views with less bandwidth than consumed than loading Gmail's blob of javascript.

But this is not the protocol for sending real files. I'd use ftp or http or torrents. Something Gemini allows you to do.

Conclusion

Overall I like the protocol. With my VPS going down I'm tempted to move all my website content to Gemini. I have an HTTP proxy for anyone who wants to view my stuff not in a Gemini client. With a little CSS I can make it a little bit nerd-free friendly. It really does make the internet simple. Could I achieve this by just making HTML with no CSS and no JS, yes.

$ published: 2022-11-25 16:30 $

-- CC-BY-4.0 jecxjo 2022-11-25

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