I discovered Gemini in 2023 and really enjoy it. I like the minimalism. I like that page presentation is up to the user. I’ve even come to appreciate the line-based nature of its markup, because theoretically at least, it means a screen reader user knows that elements are always arranged top to bottom.
I say “theoretically” since I have yet to run into an accessible Gemini browser for Windows, which is unfortunate since Gemini’s whole deal is text first.
And to head off the inevitable comment about Linux, in order to have an accessible app you need an accessible OS for it to sit on top of.
Where is there to go in Gemini? Honest question; I’m curious.
Is gopher an alternative? I was using gopher before web browsers existed. Can a precursor be considered an alternative to its descendant? It don’t feel right.
I really enjoy Geminispace. The minimalism is its best feature. As soon as I have access to HTML and CSS, I’ll fiddle with fonts, colors and layout. On my Gemini capsule I actually manage to write stuff. Gemtext is perfect as it is. No inline links provide a distraction free reading experience. The vibe is different because of the smaller community. It’s a very friendly, cozy place.
I really thought the nerds would have bailed to gemini by now. The amount of enshittification they’re willing to put up with is troubling.
The issue is that if you don’t give people imbedded images, they re-invent them with inaccessible ASCII art. If you don’t give them the ability to change fonts, they reinvent it using those awful Unicode hacks. Etc etc etc. From my experience working in the industry, you have to give people a standard way to do all of the things they want to do. Otherwise they’ll invent nine different ways of doing them, and not a single one will be accessible. When I looked via a proxy, like half the pages I encountered in gemspace had ASCII art. An accessible browser would take maybe a day or two. I just can’t think of any reason to bother.
Yes. I had the same thought. If it ever became more widely adopted the preformatted code blocks would be used to plug holes in the markup standard like tables, nested lists, etc. in a way that would not be accessible.
Also, an accessible browser would take a day or two for someone with coding experience and a desire to develop said browser, and there seems to be little overlap on that Venn diagram.
Yes, that’s what I meant. I have the experience to do it. I just see no point because of the issues with the standards.
About Gemini:
The good: good idea, gemtext is line-oriented and simpler to parse.
The bad: coming from that weird guy (IMHO, it’s not good for marketing), cannot reuse connections like HTTP, no bold or italics in the text, specifications are weird, feels half-baked like an alpha version.
I have never heard of such stuff. Sounds interesting, any links?
Gopher predates the WWW (at least to market) but ended up losing out to it.
Gemini is a spiritual successor to Gopher born out of dissatisfaction with the state of the modern web. Everything about it is deliberately, almost aggressively minimalist, to a degree that will likely put off many. But it’s meant to be human-scale, the technical details are something a technically inclined person can wrap their head around in its entirety.
FYI your Gopher link doesn’t work for some reason (or not for me, anyway)
When I copy the link it comes up as:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol
I guess the missing bracket at the end is the issue, but not sure.
This works for me, so in case it helps anyone else… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
Yeah, Markdown’s link syntax uses round brackets to enclose the URL, so some clients will think the URL is complete as soon as they encounter a closing bracket, but URLs can actually contain round brackets themselves.
The URL can be enclosed in angle brackets to avoid this:
[Gopher](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)>)Which gives this: Gopher
I never knew about the angle bracket option; do you know if that’s fairly widely accepted among the different markdown variants?
It’s part of CommonMark, so should be almost universally accepted: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#link-destination
But perhaps worth adding that the angle brackets are arguably the canonical way of designating a URL in CommonMark in general.
So, you know how on Lemmy (and many other places), you can just paste a URL and it’s automatically turned into a clickable
<a/>element? Yeah, that isn’t part of CommonMark.
Instead, you’re supposed to wrap the URL with angle brackets:<https://example.com/>Which turns into: https://example.com/
Here’s the spec for that: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#autolink
Frankly, I only know that, because mdBook doesn’t create links from just a pasted URL, it requires the angle brackets or the
[]()syntax.
(Kind of fair, since it’s for writing proper documents, but it does keep tripping me up.)Thank you, that’s very informative!
Ahh, Gopher. I remember writing a crawler for it on a VAX11/780.
And my introduction to the web was “Like Gopher, but with graphics and hypertext”.
I think as an alternative to the http/WorldWideWeb, Gemini or similar protocol is a great idea, but the markup should be a bit more extensive so people can really use it in a practical way, e.g. with emphasis (bold, italic) and inline links. Images (possibly audio with a size limit also), which would not need to be allowed inline, but should (optionally) be rendered on the same page with the text between lines where the link is, as some Gemini browsers can do but is not required in the specs.
But the most important things are 1) that it does not allow any kind of javascript or other code execution, and 2) it stays simple enough for anyone to be able to create their pages easily, for programmers to create simple, smallish browsers to render the pages, and keep that low bandwidth, so it could even be used on a mesh network (a browser for a mesh or other very low-bandwidth network could ignore media files).
Unfortunately I don’t know how it could be protected from AI any more than the normal Web can.
Semi related, this is why I have argued we should blow computers back to the speed and memory of say a 20Mhz 386. There is a lot of AI junk that could still turn up but that performance limit would heavily restrict just how much this stuff could spread.
regarding low bandwidth, I think part of the problem is the mandatory encryption, both for legal reasons because encryption is dissallowed on amateur bands in many (most?) countries, and because encryption adds overhead.
I use Gemini a bit. I think it’s a cool idea. The main annoyance is that the gemtext format is too minimalist, I would have preferred if it used a form of markdown with support for inline links, bold, italics, etc.
And to head off the inevitable comment about Linux, in order to have an accessible app you need an accessible OS for it to sit on top of.
-
Boots up Android phone
-
Installs F-Droid open-source package repository via apk
-
Uses F-Droid to install Termux Linux environment
-
In Termux, runs
$ pkg install emacs -
In Termux, runs
$ emacs -
In emacs, runs
ESC x list-packages RET -
Scrolls down to elpher, gopher/gemini emacs client. Hits
ifor “install” andxfor “execute” -
Runs
ESC x elpher RET -
Starts tapping on links and browsing.
Emacs runs on pretty much everything, so there’s a gemini client pretty much everywhere!
Cool now turn on TalkBack and cover your eyes and do all that from the beginning
I’ve never tried using emacs with my eyes shut, but aside from screenreader packages, I do see this:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacspeak
Emacspeak is a free computer application, a speech interface, and an audio desktop (as opposed to a screen reader). It employs Emacs (which is written in C), Emacs Lisp, and Tcl. Developed principally by T. V. Raman (himself blind since childhood, and who has worked on voice software with Adobe Software and later IBM), it was first released in April 1995.[1] It is portable to all POSIX-compatible OSs. It is tightly integrated with Emacs, allowing it to render intelligible and useful content rather than parsing the graphics (hence it is sometimes referred to not as a separate program, but a subsystem of Emacs); its default voice synthesizer (as of 2002, IBM’s ViaVoice Text-to-Speech (TTS)) can be replaced with other software synthesizers when a server module is installed. Emacspeak is one of the most popular speech interfaces for Linux, bundled with most major distributions. In 2014, Raman wrote an article describing how the software’s design was impacted by shifts in computer technology and its general usage over 20 years.[2]
Emacspeak achieves its integration by being written largely in Emacs Lisp using “advice”, enabling it to literally be a wrapper around most functions that change or otherwise modify the display. Auditorily, verbalizations are pre-emptible, and common actions like opening a menu or closing a file have a brief sound associated with that particular action; it also immediately verbalizes all insertions of characters, and attempts to speak as much of the context sentences around the cursor’s present location as possible.
Emacspeak facilitates access to a wide variety of content, from the web to DAISY books.[3]
It does say “Posix-compatible”. Someome apparently did an emacspeak Windows port, but it hasn’t had updates for ten years, and it doesn’t sound incredibly mature:
https://github.com/SaqibS/emacspeak-on-windows
Emacspeak on Windows
Emacspeak is an auditory interface to Emacs. It intercepts all Emacs commands, and produces feedback using text-to-speech (TTS) and audio cues (earcons).
While Emacspeak is itself cross-platform, being written in Emacs Lisp, it uses speech servers to communicate with hardware/software speech synthesizers. To get it working on Windows, I have written a speech server for Windows, using the platform’s native TTS/audio APIs. The server is actually just a command line program which reads commands from standard input, as defined in this spec.
This first version of the TTS server was really a proof of concept so that I could use Emacspeak more. Depending how much I use it, and how much interest I get from others, I may spend the time to make it more robust. Of course, pull requests are welcome. In particular, using multiple voices is not currently implemented.
-
They’re a novel idea. I had a gopher hole for a while, and did some exploring of others. Got bored quickly, personally.
