● 11.05.21

Gemini version available ♊︎

●● Gemini Protocol Does Not Need to Be Extended to Support Multimedia (It Already Supports Audio/Video as External/System-Level Objects)

Posted in Free/Libre Software at 6:41 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum e2b4f1f7cba7d3a4392961426b356067

↺ Video download link

http://techrights.org/videos/videos-in-gemini.webm

Summary: There seems to be a misunderstanding or a misconception about what Gemini is and how skeletal it should be; unlike Web browsers, Gemini clients do not attempt to be an “all-in-one” giant blobfest; they do text (like articles) and focus on being very good at that (bookmarks, navigation, search and so on)

THE founder of Gemini came back at the end of last month, reaffirming his commitment or his longstanding work to debloat the Internet, not just imitate the Web with another complex ‘standard’.

came back at the end of last month

> “Gemini is fine as it is; people should understand that any efforts to further expand it basically break compatibility with existing clients and likely miss the point of Gemini Protocol.”

Well, the founder’s return was soon followed by multiple requests to “extend” the specification and include more things (e.g. [1, 2]) — things which as many the mailing lists have already explained should not be necessary at all. Throwing everything at Gemini would lead to the same mess the World Wide Web became — likely as old a problem as two decades ago with Internet Explorer, albeit it continues to get yet worse. Video, or multimedia in general, already has software for it. Throwing everything at the browser (or Gemini client) not only leads to security issues but also bloat and complexity, which in turn increases the entry barrier to implementers of more Gemini clients. In the above video I explain how people can access videos from a Gemini client like Lagrange, which by default opened with the (almost) real-time IRC log of #techrights.

↺ 1

↺ 2

Gemini is fine as it is; people should understand that any efforts to further expand it basically break compatibility with existing clients and likely miss the point of Gemini Protocol. It’s a substitute, not a clone, of the Web. We don’t want Gemini clients to come preloaded with hundreds of megabytes of stuff and then take up hundreds of megabytes of RAM. Let the Web choke on its own making, including DRM (EME). █

“Fat operating systems spend most of their energy supporting their own fat.”

–Nicholas Negroponte, MIT Media Lab, rediff.com, Apr 2006

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