Re: ♊︎# (was Re: [ANN] GemiNaut - a user friendly Gemini browser for Windows in C#)

[Martin Keegan]

On Sat, 30 May 2020, Petite Abeille wrote:

> Perhaps some sort of informal convention, ala shebang [1], as a prelude to a text/gemini, with a few directives, such as:
>
> #!♊︎ ⌂(uʍopǝpısdn ☣︎) ⾊(black white)

This stuff surely is already doable with HTML on the normal web.

There's an ornateness spectrum, from very intricate, complex and decorated 
to very minimal and austere. On the one hand we have Catholic and Orthodox 
churches, subway graffiti, NHS GP waiting room notice boards, Geocities, 
Myspace, etc, and on the other we have Quaker meeting houses, Danshari, 
Wikipedia, medium.com, suckless.org, etc. The existing HTML-based web 
caters very well to the ornate end of the spectrum. text/gemini as 
originally conceived caters well to the minimal end.

In the present circumstances, familiarity and the lure of popularity will 
generally create a pressure to move away from the minimal end of this 
spectrum, leaving the demand it satisfied once again uncatered to. It is a 
huge shame that people who just want to write, and people who just want to 
read, must, if they want to communicate over the web, contend with vast 
amounts of complexity thrown in their way by advertisers and designers. 
Moving to duplicate the web will just fragment Gemini as the "just want to 
write and read" crowd evict themselves to a different text file format.

Mk