• 6 Posts
  • 58 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
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Cake day: March 17th, 2025

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  • The idea of “scrap this edifice and let’s see if we can do without”

    That’s what I found confusing about Gemini - its goals aren’t incompatible with HTTP but it’s deliberately trying to be incompatible with HTTP, apparently just for the sake of being different and not any technical reasons.

    To answer the original question of “What’s up with Gemini development” it seems that interest has waned because building something that’s deliberately incompatible with existing systems isn’t going to maintain broad appeal and get people creating and using content and software on the system.

    99% of the goal could be done in a web-compatible way by just having a way to declare that any site is “gemini-like” or “gopherish” by enforcing a Gopher-style hierarchy on the site, using a restricted subset of HTML (and semantic use of markup), minimal or no CSS (e.g. Smolweb’s CSS Grading), no font embeds, no images, no JS, no videos. The remaining 1% could be done with a browser extensions that activate on any such page and provide gopher-style map/menu navigation with the keyboard.