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Comment by efitz | Hacker News Reader

A large part of HTML, and a large part of modern browsers and other web technologies, are focused on ensuring that the publisher has control over the user's experience. I really like the fact that Gemini breaks that, and I hope that the project owners mercilessly reject any attempt to introduce features that allow the server to control or influence user experience.

I would really like to see structured text that is self-descriptive (e.g. this is the document title, this is a paragraph, this is a header, bullet list, etc.) but have no ability to influence HOW those things are displayed- eventually maybe we'll have browsers that can support rich theming, etc.

Others have noted that lack of images is an oversight. Perhaps the language needs a "binary file download" structure, and if the binary in question is a media file, then the browser could choose to display it. Maybe signal with mime types?

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> focused on ensuring that the publisher has control over the user's experience

Worth noting that this is modern browsers/web, and was initially not like this.

The term "user-agent" comes from that the _user_ has control over the experience, no matter what the publisher thinks. The agent (browser) acts for the user, hence user-agent.

User-agent CSS files were rampant back in the days, when a lot of content was unstyled. So you could navigate between websites and they looked the same, as they would use your user agent css files.

But then everyone decided they had to have a unique look on the web (CSS). Then they decided they needed unique functionality on the web (JavaScript). And here we are :)

as an extension of this, user stylesheets are interesting conceptually, but practically, web pages became quickly indistinguishable when the same stylesheet was applied to every page. it hindered memory (mental categorization) and recall.

users then predictably wanted pages to look different, to have style, and that's likely the principal cause of user stylesheets' decline, not corporate coercion. that's not to argue against user stylesheets per se, but that they'll likely never have wide usage.

Would it be too simple to say that you're looking for HTML without CSS ? Because HTML already has semantic tags describing "this is the title" "this is a list" etc...

But then you get tools which generate HTML which circumvents that (e.g. a giant table with 1x1 pixel cells, each cell with its own color).

As a producer you can always circumvent the constraints imposed by a software. You can use a "this-is-a-title" tag to make text appear bigger, you can use a "this-is-a-list" tag to make content linear instead of using paragraphs, etc...

What I'm saying is that there can't be a format that isn't hacked and exploited to allow the publisher to do what they want, because ultimately it's their content so they control it. Maybe limiting the existing tags in HTML is a good idea (AFAIK that's one of the strategies of AMP) but reinventing a structured format will just lead to HTML-but-less.

If you want to give control to user, then you have to do that from the User Agent: forbid any publisher-provided styling, allow only certain tags, are going to actually do what you want, instead of inventing yet another format

Maybe the best way is to have a user-agent which can OCR the content and convert it to text-only. And perhaps some AI to include some relevant images.

You'd want HTML without CSS and without all the ancient legacy HTML 3.2 styling attributes (i.e. no way to set table cell sizes/padding, no way to set colors on anything)

There is a binary file download feature, the browser can do whatever it wants with binary files, and it's signaled with mime types.

> A large part of HTML, and a large part of modern browsers and other web technologies, are focused on ensuring that the publisher has control over the user's experience.

It's also the reason why it caught on. On one hand people reject the ability to express individuality on the web, on the other a similar crowd is nostalgic about geocities and praises similar revivals. It's either one or the other.

> I would really like to see structured text that is self-descriptive (e.g. this is the document title, this is a paragraph, this is a header, bullet list, etc.) but have no ability to influence HOW those things are displayed- eventually maybe we'll have browsers that can support rich theming, etc.

How about publishing markdown over HTTPS? Then make a client that renders just that?

You can do that with gemini. It will serve whatever MIME type, and you could have a server that serves markdown files.

For that matter you can serve images or whatever binary files as individual requests (that is, not inline with another repsonse).

I've been playing with it and I rather like it.

as an early gemini convert this is one of the reasons I wish solderpunk would split the gemini protocol and text/gemini mimetype specs. gemini can serve more than text/gemini (e.g. markdown as you suggest), so embedding the text/gemini mimetype into the protocol spec seems rather like embedding the html spec into the http one

I agree in part, and disagree in part. I like that gemini has a "native" markup format, and that its simple and bare-bones as it is. It's a communications baseline, and other things are negotiable between client and browser?

> On one hand people reject the ability to express individuality on the web, on the other a similar crowd is nostalgic about geocities and praises similar revivals.

I like to think about books as of an example where content is way more important than presentation. Most of the web sites these days spend a lot more effort on how you present it than what, in the end a 1000 thousand words article now has a very complex architecture behind it, hundreds or thousands of time more than the content.

Why's it either one or the other? You could have one browser application for no-nonsense textual or informational pages and one for wacky personal geocities/myspace style pages. Feel free to enjoy both, either separately, or if you want more integration you're free to use the underlying OS shell to switch between them, read them side-by-side, link between them, etc.

> You could have one browser application for no-nonsense textual or informational pages and one for wacky personal geocities/myspace style pages.

Hence the idea of a separate markdown only browser. I don’t think http is the problem here. So it would be better to reuse as much existing tech as possible.

Note: Personally I don’t think it would catch on, the convenience of handling everything in one program is just too high.

There are a few gemini clients that support theming (inlcluding fonts, font sizes, text color for various elements, list bullet style, link color based on scheme, and page background color). This one comes to mind: https://github.com/MasterQ32/kristall

I've tried few around and this one seems to be most user-friendly, tho it looks like it has trouble displaying menus with multiple entries (spacebar interpretation)

If the browser can support rich theming, I guess it can load any images inline if the user wishes.

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