What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it? (2020)

Re:What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it?... by AstralStorm on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @03:58AM (#28602928)

> Nobody is going to force you to use JavaScript.

But they sure try. Latest iteration of coercion is called Google AMP.

Images, videos and other embeds are fine, because they're clear siloes; it's easy to make sure the website degrades gracefully.

JS is not, and fonts are not. These do not degrade gracefully. Neither do complex styles in CSS. Canvas does not degrade either.

Gemini is a bit too simple to be really useful. What is needed is something closer to old HTML 2 before all the browser warfare, with a few small extras tossed in from later versions. Maybe with bit more of semantic format than representational.

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Re:What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it?... by Semiapies on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @04:11AM (#28602988)

Google AMP is five years old. Hardly the latest anything. And it's yet another thing you simply don't have to use.

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Re:What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it?... by maxwell on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @08:44AM (#28604491)

> Latest iteration of coercion is called Google AMP.

I changed my default search engine from GSearch to DDG a couple years ago because of AMP, but it's now thankfully dead in the water, e.g.

https://searchengineland.com/google-news-app-will-display-no...

https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/366242/amp-de...

https://www.seroundtable.com/google-remove-amp-no-search-ran...

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Re:What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it?... by why_only_15 on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @04:44AM (#28603136)

I don't understand the level of interest in degrading some people have. Really I don't understand any level at all. What percent of users are running something other than an auto-updating browser?

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Re:What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it?... by Santosh83 on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @04:09AM (#28602982)

Are you sure fonts don't degrade gracefully? The font stack can always fallback to serif/sans-serif right? Icon fonts are a different beast though.

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Re:What is this Gemini thing, and why am I excited about it?... by foxfluff on Tuesday September 21, 2021 @09:34AM (#28604874)

I disable web fonts. That makes many sites very difficult to use. Yes, icon fonts are a part of that, but also the change in metrics messes up some layouts rather bad.

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