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by deanebarker 37 days ago
This is what you want: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_(protocol)
1 comments

Gemini is cool for many reasons, but it fails in being able to encode complex documents, or use semantically or visually useful structures common to many documents.

There is:

- No metadata.

- No emphasis.

- No citations.

- No way to mark up nouns like a person, or a company.

- No way to present documents with a complex heading hierarchy past level 3 (for those who argue that more is not necessary, please consider that headings are basically cognitive sub-directories. Do you want to work on a file system that only lets you go two levels below "/"?).

I'd personally favour (but not advocate for) something like a super-lightweight Docbook grammar which is standardised, and already has great tooling available for it.

It succeeds in being so simple that it's useless to 99% of people, which limits its growth and eventual co-opting by capitalism and mainstream culture, and Eternal September.

Not everything has to be for everyone. Gemini is only for a very specific kind of deeply aescetic technological misanthrope that wants basic plaintext with links (basically Gopher++) and finds little else to be useful.