Cognitive aspects of navigation in gemini space

[Luke Emmet]

Hi Michael

On 14-May-2020 18:50, Michael Lazar wrote:
> 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.
I think that would be a nice start, perhaps with a colour hint to be 
considered by the client, but of course not everyone can map their identity
onto a single unicode code point!

I really like the Haiku small vector graphic format. It is a bazillion 
times simpler than SVG and
makes for crisp icons and different resolutions

https://www.haiku-os.org/docs/userguide/en/applications/icon-o-matic.html

Regards

  - Luke