[progval]

> It's still possible if you use uBlock, or enable JS only when you need it.

Possible, but painful. Take HN's official search engine, for example: https://hn.algolia.com/

I open it. "This page will only work with JavaScript enabled" sigh Accept JS from hn.algolia.net and the mangled cloudfront domain (and make sure not to accept ravenjs.com). Possibly cdn.jsdelivr.net if I want to spare a click later, because I don't know if it's useful (it's not). Reload. Now the results are blank. Ah, it makes XHRs to telemetry.algolia.net, a mangled algolia.net domain, and three mangled algolianet.com domains. Think for a second. Accept the latter too (actually, either is enough, but I don't know that). Reload. Oh, it works now. Luckily there isn't a privacy consent popup I need to reject (or block with uBlock).

It's exhausting to do that almost every time you visit a new website. And with https:// URLs, you don't know ahead of time how many rounds of accepting you'll need to do before opening.

[ratorx]

I’m not that familiar with Gemini, but implementing search functionality via Gemtext is impossible right? Would the appropriate comparison not be pages that are similarly static to Gemtext?

I’m not convinced that an entirely new protocol is necessary. How is the Gemini experience different from just browsing all webpages with JS disabled, or if you want to go even further, using a web browser that just doesn’t implement JavaScript?

[ygpa]

There are a couple of search engines in Gemini already, as the server software can do as much computing as it wants before serving a page.

[kamalatta]

Even for gopher there is more than one search engine [1] besides the glourious Veronica-2.

[1] gopher://forthworks.com/1/contrition