Solderpunk recently started second guessing some gemini things over on cornedbeef:

cornedbeef - the mercury protocol

In short, I hate it and hope you don't do it.

Why?

confusion toward the great momentum of gemini

we already have gopher and mercury doesn't do enough "new" to be worth it

formatting lines is important (see 10,000 mailing list posts for reasons why)

preformatting lines don't actually allow for extensibility if you just define the alt text thing in the spec

TLS is annoying and a barrier to server & client writing, but it's also one of the things that has attracted a lot of positive attention

"lang" is going to be essential

Honestly, the only thing in the Mercury spec that I think is a good idea is just biting the bullet and saying UTF-8 is manditory for text/gemini. I don't see a downside there. So, uh... do that! And we shall never speak of this Mercury thing ever again, okay?

Originally Published 2020-05-27 at:

gemini://tilde.team/~tomasino/journal/20200527-mercury-hells-no.gmi

If you have questions or thoughts to add please send me a link to your response.

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