HTML as an escape hatch

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Nathan Galt once stated:
> There’s a persistent worry on other threads that Gemini might become “too
> complex”, for some definition of “complex”.
> 
> This is a reasonable worry, considering the very complicated mess we’re
> all running from.
> 
> On the other hand, I think there’s a fairly, if not fully, general
> counterargument to all sorts of additions that we might want to make to
> the spec:
> 
> “There’s nothing wrong — or even uncool — about making a website with only
> HTML and, at most, 30 lines of CSS that looks great in Lynx.”
> 
> Thoughts? Counterarguments?

  It's one of the anti-Gemini arguments I've seen on sites like Hacker News
(https://news.ycombinator.com)---why not just use a stripped down HTML and
webservers that do what you want?  And yes, there is something to that
agument, but solderpunk has made it clear he doesn't want any crack that
will lead to the current web (and personally, I would love it if the
"application web" went via QUIC and the "original hypertext web" stayed on
TCP).

  The problem I see with gemtext (and having been on the mailing list from
the beginning, way over half the messages have been about the gemtext
format) is that people *want* their HTML, but it's mostly different subsets
of HTML.  About the only agreement is the absence of Javascript.

  Personally, I'm not a fan of the gemtext format as I find it restrictive
in a way that I don't find plain text or HTML, but it is what it is.  All I
do is put up pages with the proposed specification and see if there are
complaints (and there were---oh the surprise).

  Again, if you want formatting, HTML and Markdown are there for you to use
on Gemini.

  -spc