Extensibility holes and client diversity

Skyjake:

> Lagrange v1.11 will have a few related tweaks and fixes, including displaying images in data URLs inline automatically.

skyjake — Our Old Friend, the Data URL

I believe Petite Abeille, who delighted in finding ways to subvert Gemini, was the first to point out this possibility (on the mailing list in 2020).

"No inline images" has been an important feature of Gemini from the start. As I see it, it's key to the textual focus which is one of the main things which distinguishes Gemini from the web.

Solderpunk tried hard to keep Gemini inextensible, such that the complexity of a "minimal fully-featured client" would not grow over time as it has with the web. But there are a few extensibility holes like this. I believe his hope was that the low bar for developing a client would mean that there would be a great diversity of clients in actual use, so any attempt by a few clients to exploit one of those holes would fail, because authors wouldn't want to write pages which would only work as intended for a fraction of their audience.

So, I see this is the first serious test of that idea. If skyjake does go ahead and implement this (I hope he'll reconsider, but it seems he's already put some thought into it), will people then actually start including images in their gemtext like this, even though other clients will fail more or less drastically with them? If so, will other clients then accept the inevitable and start supporting them too? If so, how long before we see gemini pages which are 1KB text and 1MB advertising images?

My guess is actually that the difficulties in producing the encoded uri and editing gemtext with humongously long link lines will be enough to stop this from taking off. But we'll see.

Apologies to skyjake for the negativity... I know he just wants to add a cool feature which will benefit his users, I hope he won't take this personally.