What is Gemini

(a dump of a chat session explaining it to a friend)

ok. gemini is like the world wide web, but minimalist

WWW is basically the combination of three things: HTTP (the language for downloading webpages), HTML (the language in which the pages are written) and URLs (a way for one HTML document to refer to another one, e.g., http://google.com)

Gemini retains the idea of URLs, but they look like gemini://

Gemini replaces HTTP and HTTPS (which is HTTP + SSL, an encryption layer), with its own SSL-based encrypted protocol very similar to HTTP/0.9, i.e., HTTP circa 1993

it replaces HTML with its own fileformat, which is similar to what wikipedia uses, in terms of functionality

you'll observe that wikipedia does *NOT* have popups, animations, colours, shit moving all over the place, dismissable nagging stuff. this is because it doesn't use HTML to pull in Javascript. Gemini on the other hand simply does not support HTML or Javascript, so you *can't* make sites that are slow/annoying.