Hacker News Reader

Comment by billyhoffman | Hacker News Reader

Gemini is a lot of fun. It feels like the mid-90's web. As a reader, I stumble upon interesting content all the time. As a developer and hacker, it's neat to play with. Currently its about 500,000 pages, so crawling and indexing it is easy. There is no way to commercialize it, so people are just experimenting and having fun. One person hooked up some interactive text games from Infocom like Zork.

A few things I've built:

- Kennedy - a search engine

- Gemipedia - A wikipedia proxy

- A clone of Worlde, a geography game

- A weather lookup service

I find the limits of it refreshing.

gemini://gemi.dev/

View on HN

> It feels like the mid-90's web.

mid-90's web embraced weirdness and creativity. Primarily recognizing that we get so much info visually.

Gemini says: no, it's only text, no creativity or weirdness allowed. While I sort of understand where the authors are coming from, I think they threw the baby (or some of the baby) away with the bathwater.

Yes, some of this can be rectified by clients (like the insistence that images must be external), but clients can only take it so far.

You're saying that text cannot be weird or creative?

I wonder if you're limiting yourself there.

When all you have is plain text, sure, you can get creative with that text.

Space Jam website it won't be https://www.spacejam.com/1996/

It’s not text only. It’s 1 page == 1 request. Meaning that a page can have links to images but a client will not fetch them and display them inline. This prevents cross-site tracking where view a page forces the client to also make a request to a 3rd party like an ad or web bug

I built an entire geography guess game in Gemini. It uses images.

Awesome!

And it looks like Kennedy has indexed my gemlog, so that's pretty neat.

gemini://dungeonhack.net

How does Kennedy work? I thought Gemini was read-only.

> 3.2.1 1x (INPUT)

> Status codes beginning with 1 are INPUT status codes, meaning:

> The requested resource accepts a line of textual user input. The <META> line is a prompt which should be displayed to the user. The same resource should then be requested again with the user's input included as a query component. Queries are included in requests as per the usual generic URL definition in RFC3986, i.e. separated from the path by a ?. Reserved characters used in the user's input must be "percent-encoded" as per RFC3986, and space characters should also be percent-encoded.

https://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi

Reply on news.ycombinator.com