[unethical_ban]

I don't knock Gemini for existing and being a neat project, but even for hobby it seems too restrictive. No cookies means no authenticated interaction with a site, no inline images means it's less informative than a 100 year old encyclopedia.

Perhaps a "Simple Web" spec could be created to audit a site and verify its privacy and simplicity protections. Things like "Cookies only for auth", "No JS" or "low JS", "No ref tracking in or out", "No tracking pixels", etc.

[akkartik]

You'd have to prove these things are possible in the face of the ingenuity of the entire adtech industry. The limitations you point out, on the other hand, have easy solutions:

* auth: Look at https://github.com/kr1sp1n/awesome-gemini#services Tons of services support some form of auth.

Edit: https://martinrue.com/station is another service I use that's missing in the above list.

* images: click to load

Janky but doable. Janky is the price you have to pay to avoid adtech.

[account42]

What makes you think the adtech industry won't just embed ads in text if this becomes popular at all. You don't need any kind of technology for ads, only eyeballs.

[akkartik]

Adtech isn't about showing ads. It's about targeting ads. And yes, if Gemini gets wildly popular maybe they'll think of something. Good problem to have! New mistakes instead of same old ones!

[CharlesW]

> Janky is the price you have to pay to avoid adtech.

I don't understand, unless adtech is holding your family hostage and forcing you to adtech. Can you elaborate?

[akkartik]

If you want to support cat pictures that show up without clicking a link, but prevent any behavioral exhaust from tracking pixels, that seems to be an open problem. Every new feature is like this: a risk surface until proven otherwise. So to reduce risk you have to limit features, i.e. jank.

[CharlesW]

The claim was, "Janky is the price you have to pay to avoid adtech", but adtech cannot prevent you from making a jank-less, universally accessible page or site about your cats or whatever you like. IMHO, one really can't be part of the solution if one's left the protocols mainstream for the digital equivalent of an off-grid cabin in the woods.

[akkartik]

You're right from the perspective of a website author, but the original comment I responded to is from the perspective of the protocol designer. There is no known way to design a protocol that can be used to create polished experiences without also letting some ingenious website suck up behavioral data.

> One can still be part of the solution without leaving the modern-standards-based mainstream altogether for the digital equivalent of an off-grid cabin in the woods.

So many judging words there. A new protocol is an off-grid cabin in the woods, but building a non-janky universally accessible website isn't? You'll have to prove you can get a random new website more traffic over https without doing nefarious shit and letting the big adtech companies crawl it.

[ninjalanternshk]

Astute observation. Gopher is in fact a portal that lets you teleport from one off-grid cabin to another, all around the world. And some people like that.

[NoboruWataya]

Authenticated sessions are supported using client certificates.

No inline images is a significant restriction indeed but it also gives you a high degree of confidence that most Gemini pages will be very lightweight. I don't find it that limiting. It all goes back to the point that Gemini is intended to supplement the web and not replace it - if you want image heavy content you can get it elsewhere. Personally I find the lack of inline formatting and links more frustrating.

[JdeBP]

No inline images is not a restriction of the protocol. It's a restriction of the text/gemini MIME content type, and of the browser implementations. A server can still respond with text/html content over the GEMINI protocol, with embedded <image/> data. The GEMINI protocol specification does not restrict what RFC2045 types can be used.

* https://geminiprotocol.net/docs/protocol-specification.gmi

* https://iana.org/assignments/media-types/media-types.xhtml

[account42]

What exactly do you think you are proving? It doesn't matter what some spec theoretically allows, if you want to server something to gemini users it can't have inline images.

[SoftTalker]

Nothing prevents a gemini browser from showing inline images (though it might be officially discouraged?). They are just links.

But actually loading images separately can work well. If you are reading for the text content you can save the time and bandwidth to load of all the images, or maybe you want to look at one image in detail, you can load just that one, and zoom or frame that independently of the surrounding text.

[kai_mac]

I do think it's a shame that Gemini doesn't have images and richer text, but maybe it would be even less popular/successful if it had those. Gemini won't be the last of these simple protocols so it's a useful learning opportunity.

My project at the moment is kind of related to these "simple web" ideas. Instead of giving up on HTML altogether I'm making a simple web browser, to see if there's a way to render even relatively complex existing pages, like Wikipedia or news sites, without needing to implement much or any CSS. A bit like "reader mode". (link if you are interested: https://codeberg.org/kaimac/weaver)

[asdfalsrgkj]

How about:

- no scripts of any kind

- no cookies

- no forms

- all resources (e.g., styles, images) needed for display inlined

- a spacious minimum cap on data URI length

- elaborate the <a> tag a bit to allow a series of content addresses (hashes, IPFS, magnet URIs, etc.) for references

Basically, a "dead" subset of HTML suitable for distributing documents.

[captn3m0]

I keep writing the same comment every time this is brought up, but browsers need to support text/markdown.

[akkartik]

You'll need to be more specific since there are many variants of Markdown and the original explicitly permits arbitrary html.

[xosc]

CommonMark is pretty standard (even if not perfect) and you're in the browser anyway so arbitrary html is not really a problem..

[akkartik]

Umm, see what problem this thread is trying to solve using markdown.

[account42]

Technically depending on the implementation, markdown is a superset of HTML.

[MrVandemar]

Markdown? Terrible "spec".

Browsers already support XML.

You can spin up a HTML-but-restricted XML grammar (with extra stuff even, like footnotes and stuff) and a CSS file in maybe half an hour, and it'll render in your browser just fine.

(Yeah, it'll be missing all the accessibility provisions, but you know, the base to build on is there, whereas "MarkDown in the browser" rendering has been often suggested and never implemented).

[krapp]

Just choose a subset of Markdown that doesn't allow inline HTML.

This always comes up as an intractible problem in these discussions but I don't get it. If you're making a new protocol you can define a Markdown spec for that protocol. As long as it renders sensibly as plaintext then it's fine. Gemtext is basically already that.

Also let's be honest - almost everyone looking for an alternative to the web is a techie jaded about the modern web stack and its complexity who wants to reinvent things according to their own specific preferences and hyperfixations, mostly because it's fun. Such people tend to like markdown and not like XML or HTML so the chances of anyone making a web alternative that uses either is practically moot, regardless of any actual technical merit or interoperability with the web stack. And for a lot of people not being compatible with the web would be a feature, not a bug.

[MrVandemar]

Can't argue with the success of Markdown.

It's still a lousy "spec", and, again, I often see people wishing for a Markdown web browser, but I don't see anyone implementing such a thing. You'd think it would be an instant success!

Yeah, I am a jaded techie. I wanted to like Markdown and used it extensively for a little while and wound up utterly loathing it for anything other than jotting down a quick, ephemeral note.

But, back to my original response: if you want a usable alternative to HTML, right now, a simple XML grammar + style sheet will deliver that. Firefox, Chrome, Edge and Safari will render it nicely. Heck, even Docbook would work (which is overkill, but has vast and mature tooling available).

[iamnothere]

Inline images are a client implementation/styling detail. Some clients have it, but most don’t as most users don’t seem to want it. I believe Lagrange (the most “visual” browser) has this feature.

[chirsz]

It's https://smolweb.org/

[MrVandemar]

Sooner or later "inline images" == "advertising".

And "tracking pixels".

Keeping them separate was a smart move, and entirely consistent with the underlying philosophy.

[krapp]

Inline images can be advertising. Images you have to fetch manually can be advertising. Text can be advertising. Anywhere you have a means to exchange information, you can also have advertising.

[MrVandemar]

There's a difference between push and pull for images.

If you have to manually click a link to an image, and it's advertising, then there's a loss of trust with the rest of the links on the page.

If the page includes adverts that render automatically, you just say "meh" and try to read the content in a sea of increasingly intrusive and repetitive advertising.

Text advertising is not as successful or intrusive as image advertising.