Cognitive aspects of navigation in gemini space

[Michael Lazar]

On Thu, May 14, 2020 at 11:56 AM Luke Emmet <luke.emmet at gmail.com> wrote:
> Is there a simple and gemini-friendly way for us to (optionally!) convey
> this sense of place. For example, to set a simple global favicon or
> background colour for pages on a certain site. It could help with user's
> task of navigation and understanding exactly where they are. I know
> there are lots of CLI junkies around here, so maybe this hasn't been a
> priority so far.
>
> I'm not proposing anything heavy or like the www, but I feel there could
> be some simple sweet spot here to be investigated.

Hi!

I really appreciate that you brought up favicons. I've also been thinking
about how they might be a fun and useful way to give a bit of "personality"
to sites as they appear in bookmark lists, etc.

The original implementation of favicons on the web was so simple and nice.
Just plop a favicon.ico file in your root of your directory and you're
done! Now on the modern web, it's gotten complicated with every browser
having their own conventions on what the optimized size/format should be.
So you end up needing to use a tool to generate 8 different file formats
and link to them to using various <meta> tags in the page header.

I think utilizing unicode characters, specifically emojis, might be an
elegant solution to this problem. They're scalable to any resolution and
standard enough to provide a uniform experience across sites. A content
author wouldn't need to worry about their image being transparent or
looking like crap on higher resolutions, for example. And of course, they
would work on terminal clients too!

My proposed convention would be something like this

gemini://my-site.com/favicon.txt

This resource should be optional. If it exists, it should contain a single
unicode character (the exact semantics of what a "character" is would need
to be ironed out). Clients may chose to display this character alongside
links or in the page title bar.

Regards,
Michael
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