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Comment by knowledge-clay | Hacker News Reader

It's not OK in the sense that it is a spec violation, at least. Some clients have images that load in-line on mouseover or click, which isn't a spec violation. You could do that with HTML.

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If people specifically sought out your client because it automatically renders images inline, who could be bothered to get upset about a "spec violation"? The author of Gemini? What would he be able to do?

Honestly asking because I'm curious.

Probably someone would submit a PR complaining. A lot of folks in the gemini community are strict about the spec. In my view, they would be justified in doing so — I think adherence to specs is important in any domain, not just gemini.

Drew himself threatened to block a Gemini agent that fetched /favicon.png on every page load. I tend to agree with the idea that Gemini should not be extended, as there's always HTTP+HTML for that.

That's disappointing to hear. It breaks what I would expect from the project's purported server-agent separation. What about user choice?

I kind of agree with him, despite being of the opinion that optional inline images should be allowed by the spec. Fetching favicons is going a bit too far for my tastes.

I definitely see situations where Gemini wants to be as bandwidth-friendly as possible, and certain clients auto-downloading resources from the same server would make it difficult to estimate costs/resources/etc.

However for external images available over http/s, I think that should be up to the client.

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