The Hotdog web browser and browser engine

Why?

Because desktop computing used to be a battlegrounds for commercial vendors in the late 20th century, and the goal was establishing market dominance. Being able to control who can run what on a platform was / still is part and parcel towards establishing that goal.

Web browsers changed the game. They are a threat and an opportunity at the same time. A threat because gave anyone a chance to escape from a native context and run whatever you want in a browser regardless of the platform your on. No more having to compile and distribute the same application for a dozen potential targets.

Microsoft was so adamant on having Explorer bundled with their OS in order to establish control over the future evolution of web applications on the information highway. And they got famously burned for it in that 1999 anti-trust case.

Application delivery as you know it today is convenient, but that came at a price. Vast amounts of resources have been poured into Chromium over the past two decades to bring that experience to billions. And it didn't happen out of sheer altruism on the part of Google.

If they are close to the edge cases of the spec, just not testing on Firefox will break it. By negligence, rather than malice.

Prohibiting clients from loading inline images is not mandated by the spec either, so Gemini doesn't prevent it. Loading images inline is fine, as long as it's triggered by a user action. A core idea of Gemini is user control: network requests shouldn't happen without user consent just as presentation should be determined by the user agent.

Non-spec-compliant behavior is also fine if it's explicitly enabled by a user; the default should be spec-compliant.

> You can do exactly this same thing with the modern web with CSS styling and userscripts - the difference being that the web gives you saner defaults that are more conducive to thought, and Gemini clients seem to give you less-sane defaults that are less conducive to thought.

Try changing your browser's default background color and you'll end up seeing a bunch of pages with black text on a gray background. Change your browser's default text layout to two columns and see how many sites still work. The featureset of the web encourages authors to use those features, which begets complexity; complexity begets fragility.

Also, I'm not sure what you mean by "sane defaults"; The "default" HTML presentation is raw markup, and isn't exactly readable. The "default" Gemtext presentation is perfectly readable; in fact, all but two of the blog posts on seirdy.one were initially drafted in raw gemtext rather than markdown. Perhaps you were referring to the default stylesheets of the major browser engines. This is client behavior, and should be compared with existing Gemini clients that focus on presentation as well.

The web allows authors to dictate presentation and deliver content with visual branding; Gemini prevents this to make the focus on content rather than form.

> ...and, modern webtech has accessibility properties that allow for annotation of non-text media with text. Gemini? Does not.

Like the Web and Gopher, Gemini links have display-text. Image links are the same. I consume Gemtext with a screenreader quite regularly, and image consumption is much less painful than it is on the Web. Knowing that users will see text before an image encourages Gemini authors to use good alt-text and to only include images when they convey necessary information that text cannot. Superfluous images are virtually non-existent.

> Machines cannot understand plain text - it must be parsed. English (and other natural languages) are not machine-parseable, and machine-readable plain text had no reason to not exist as structured data in the first place.

That wasn't my point; my point was that text can be parsed and processed by machines much better than other forms of information, improving information dissemination.

> All of the other kinds of electronic data that exist in the modern web can also be stored and transmitted without information loss, so this is not a special property.

Unless you want to load a bunch of 5mb images, you're going to need re-sizing and lossy compression. https://xkcd.com/1683/

> Show me how to write out all of the variants of the Schrödinger Equation[1] in plain text, while still making it as readable, understandable, and useful as the mathematical formulas.

I admit that Gemini isn't great at mathematical formulae. Some people are working on Gemini clients that can understand LaTeX code fences.

> Show me how to describe the sound of a violin.

Include a link to an audio file so it plays when the user wants it to. Several clients can play inline audio and video.

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Gemini isn't for everyone and everything, and that's kind of the point. It certainly doesn't seem like something meant for you, since you seem to be focused on research papers and apps. It's not trying to replace your OS, it's trying to be a part of it. Gemini also doesn't intend to replace the Web; it intends to focus on structured hypertext. The web became a steaming mess because of the feature overload you've described; the solution is to focus on being able to do fewer things and to restrict what's possible to prevent the same thing from happening.

I don't think we'll see eye-to-eye on this, because this looks like a value-based discussion on quality versus quantity to me when I don't think one is trying to replace the other. Alternatives aren't replacements; Gemini is an alternative, not a replacement.