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Discovering Gemini last week seems to have reawakened a part of my brain that's been dormant for a very long time, and I thought I'd make an attempt at exploring that avenue of thought a little bit further. Let's start by taking a brief walk down memory lane!

I became a Freshman at Cornell University in the autumn of 1992 with absolutely no prior knowledge of the Internet, but I quickly found myself at home using telnet, FTP, and gopher to navigate the exciting new world I was discovering. At that time, everything on the Internet centered around text, so my experience was purely textual. Eighty columns, twenty five rows, at first on an IBM PC XT compatible, but soon on a shiny new Intel 80486 computer.

It wasn't until the spring of 1993 that I first saw the World Wide Web. It had such an effect on me that I remember the exact moment quite vividly: I was visiting my friend Scott in his dorm room down the hall from mine, and he showed me a Vatican exhibit at the Library of Congress using NCSA Mosaic. I was instantly captivated, and spent the next two decades of my life working with the web in one way or another.

The first part of my career focused on information layout and retrieval on the Web. This was the mid to late 1990s, a time when static HTML ruled the world, a time when the job title "webmaster" still existed. I was a webmaster. I built web sites with some important goals in mind:

Documents should be linked together with hypertext, forming webs of information

In the mid 1990s, this was pretty standard practice. The World Wide Web lived up to its name, and was quite literally a web of hypertext. You could explore from site to site, from host to host, and from document to document. You could follow whatever trail of links best suited your avenue of thought and research.

But all of this began to change in the early 2000s. As corporations moved more of their presence to the web, information began to become siloed. Adobe Flash appeared, and later JavaScript took over. The web became about graphic design instead of information retrival. Now, this was not a bad thing in an of itself! Good and clear design is a superb way to showcase information. But largely, that's not what happened. Instead, design began to obscure and hide information.

Then, as a final blow, social media and single-page web apps took over. The web became about walled gardens, keeping you trapped, selling you to advertisers, and keeping you engaged.

The modern Web is here to stay. Single page JavaScript apps are the standard, they're not going away. I do think that they have their place, and I'm not completely against them, but I regret losing the hypertext web of information that we once had.

I love the fact that Gemini is about text. When I build a Gemini capsule, I'm focusing on informational content, not about how to make it look. I'm not focusing on layout or design or embedding JavaScript or images. Gemini really has the feel of the mid 1990s Web. It feels like exploring again!

There are a few things I miss that Gemini markup doesn't (yet?) support.

Probably the one I miss most is in-line hypertext links. I think linked words or phrases inside text are extremely useful for presenting information naturally, and I do wish Gemini markup supported them. Maybe in the future.

I miss emphasis markers as well. I'd like to see bold and italic hints supported in text. There's no reason to require or enforce a browser to honor them, but perhaps something like *bold* and /italic/ could be supported optionally some day.

I also sort of miss embedded images, but only a very little bit! I think it's probably better to continue to not support embedded images, given how they can be abused.

I don't know what the future of Gemini looks like yet, but I'm pleased to see how much attention it's suddenly getting. I wish I'd found it sooner, but I'm glad I'm here now.

Some Thoughts on Gemini

Ancient History

Rise (and Fall?) of the World Wide Web

Gemini

What I'm Not Sure About Yet

Conclusion