A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternative to the web

Re:A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternat... by aronpye on Saturday July 04, 2020 @06:26AM (#23731384)

How is the issue not bloated websites? You can easily create a text only website in HTML which is compatible with every existing internet capable device. All technology can be misused, it isn’t necessarily a problem with the underlying technology. By introducing yet more standards and technologies, you end up creating bloat and fragmentation of a different kind.

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Re:A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternat... by tryauuum on Saturday July 04, 2020 @07:46AM (#23731672)

There is also an allure of having a client that will never run some weird god-know-what-doing javascript code.

Of course you can just disable javascript in your HTTP browser. But as the author states, it's easier to write a completely new client than to disable all the bloat in e.g. firefox.

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Re:A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternat... by aronpye on Saturday July 04, 2020 @09:54AM (#23732178)

Agreed, but like I’ve said elsewhere the effort would be better spent modifying an existing browser to be lightweight. That would gain more widespread adoption than a whole new client-server protocol. You’d also gain the benefit of better interoperability with screen readers and such like.

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Re:A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternat... by vertex-four on Saturday July 04, 2020 @10:52AM (#23732616)

Nobody involved in Gemini wants "widespread adoption", because that inevitably means big commercial organisations coming into the space where right now they're having a lovely time building a community.

Screen readers handle Gemini just fine - one of the clients I've tried outputs text and buttons in a GTK window, another literally just outputs text into a terminal and takes command line input, if a screenreader couldn't handle that I'd be horrified. The format is paragraph-based, there's very little styling, no guessing at what the main content on a page is.

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Re:A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternat... by peteyboy on Sunday July 05, 2020 @04:17AM (#23737300)

So you say the "effort". There are 50-some line gemini clients, and more than a few people have coded graphical clients in a few days by themselves. Same with servers. Is modifying firefox or palemoon really going to be a "better spent" effort?

I think screen readers can read text pretty well, also, since you've declared that to be a goal for some reason.

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Re:A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternat... by arghwhat on Monday July 06, 2020 @05:09AM (#23746002)

Unfortunately, having worked on both Chromium and Firefox, I can inform you that modifying an existing browser to be lightweight is an unfeasible project.

It's a waste of time compared to just making something new. That doesn't mean that normal browsers couldn't also get gopher support for those not interested in a lightweight browser.

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Re:A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternat... by arghwhat on Monday July 06, 2020 @05:13AM (#23746023)

Your browser is a monster of a machine, even when loading a text-only HTML page. The browser UI itself is a web application, after all.

You cannot do anything lightweight with a browser supporting, and itself being written in, web technologies.

Fragmentation is intentional. Although, nothing stops a web browser from also gaining gemini/gopher support. Just won't be "minimal".

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