Gemini is not Gemini

Today I've seen two articles on lobste.rs

Gemini is Useless

Why Gemini is not my favorite internet protocol

and both articles refer to both the protocol and the text format as Gemini.

I think that Solderpunk did a huge mistage by naming both a protocol and a markup format Gemini and even put both specifications into the same text file. This sparks a lot of confusion and leads to statements like

I think the gemini protocol is shit as they don't allow inline linking
- a wild person on the internet

and I think this is hurting the gemini ecosystem a lot. I usually refer to the text format as "gemtext" or "gemini text" and the protocol as either "gemini://" or "gemini protocol" to make it clear what I'm talking about.

I mean: Yes, this blog is written in gemtext, and is also served via gemini. But you can always serve "text/html", "text/css" and "application/javascript" over the gemini protocol and create browser plugins for things like Firefox or Chromium to allow them serve gemini space content and have the users have the usual web experience in terms of usability.

You could even think about allowing something like web sockets in the JS api to allow feedback to the server (or invent a whole new format around that). Or why not start to develop something completly new and make a browser that can process "application/lua" instead of "application/javascript" as a scripting language.

The gemini project stands for a web where the user should be in control over the requests done by their browser (and Kristall 💎 will adhere to that principle). But imho you can still create a Browser that could support Lua scripting, nice CSS styles and complex document formats and still adhere to those principles.

Gemini is a young project and not every use case has been discovered yet.

So go out and hack your thing! The gemini protocol is simple enough to get your idea up and running in a short time!

- xq