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Comment by SirFatty | Hacker News Reader

Which is exactly the point of Gemini.

I'm a dinosaur who bemoans the loss of whatever-it-was we had prior to the mass exploitation and saturation of the web today, so I feel it's my duty to check out Gemini and stop complaining. I'm prepared to trade ease of use or some modern functionality for better content and less of what the internet has become.

Not quite. I think Gemini has deliberately gone for a "text only" philosophy, which I think is very constraining.

The early web had a lot going on and allowed for a lot of creative experimentation which really caught the eye and the imagination.

Gemini seems designed to only allow long-form text content. You can't even have a table let alone inline images which makes it very limited for even dry scientific research papers, which I think would otherwise be an excellent use-case for Gemini. But it seems that this sort of thing is a deliberate design/philosophical decision by the authors which is a shame. They could have supported full markdown, but they chose not to (ostensibly to ease client implementation but there are a squillion markdown libraries so that assertion doesn't hold water for me)

It's their protocol so they can do what they want with it, but it's why I think Gemini as a protocol is a dead-end unless all you want to do is write essays (with no images or tables or inline links or table-of-contents or MathML or SVG diagrams or anything else you can think of in markdown). Its a shame as I think the client-cert stuff for Auth is interesting.

There are images in geminispace, and audio, and (probably) video. It's just not inline. One of constraints of the protocol is that pages cannot load content without your express say-so.

It’s tough but one of the tenets of Gemini is that a lone programmer can write their own client in a spirited afternoon/weekend. Markdown is just a little too hard to clear the bar. Already there was much bellyaching on the mailing list about forcing dependence on SSL libraries; suggesting people rely on more libraries would have been a non-starter

Note that the Gemini protocol is just a way of moving bytes around; nothing stops you from sending Markdown if you want (and at least some clients will render it - same with inline images).

Didn't the creator of the protocol go on a rant when someone made a browser for Gemini that included a favicon?

I can't imagine the backlash if someone tried to normalize Markdown. Isn't the entire point of Gemini that it can never be extended or expanded upon?

Maybe it would be better to create an entirely different protocol/alt web around Markdown that didn't risk running afoul of Gemini's philosophical restrictions?

I think a "markdown-web" that uses some of the Gemini approaches for privacy and auth/identity etc would be pretty nice.

Of course, as others have said, we could just use HTML without JavaScript or cookies and we'd be a lot of the way there with 95% less effort but hey in the future we'll probably just query an AI rather than load a web page ourselves.

Given how many people on HN say they like Gemini in principle but wish it weren't so restrictive, some people would use it. All of those people might just be that cross section of HN users, however.

Yeah, instead someone makes a new and incompatible protocol whenever they want to change it.

> The SmolNet consists of content available through alternative protocols outside the web such as gemini:// gopher:// Gopher+ gophers:// finger:// spartan:// text:// SuperText nex:// scorpion:// mercury:// titan:// guppy:// scroll:// molerat:// terse:// fsp://. There is a summary of the main SmolNet protocols.

- https://wiki.archiveteam.org/index.php/SmolNet

Molerat at least seems to use Markdown but many do seem to be "Gemini but X." I wonder how much use any of those get?

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