Some thoughts about Gemini UX

[Jason McBrayer]

Hans Gerwitz writes:
> ## Capsule branding

Branding and brand-building are the banes of modern society, and only
useful to the vectorialist class, never the hacker class.

> It’s important for users to experience a sense of place as they
> navigate (as per Luke Emmet’s “cognitive aspects” thread from May
> 2020) but also important to give content creators some control over
> the presentation of their text.

If you want control over the presentation of your text, serve a PDF. The
uniformity of Gemini pages is a feature. The way Lagrange and Geminaut
auto-style pages is a good way of providing a sense of place without
giving the author another lever to abuse.

>
> I appreciate the need to avoid spurious network requests, especially
> across servers. But rules like “user takes action” are impossible to
> enforce (and scrolling is an action).

Note that loading images on scrolling allows a particularly nasty kind
of behavioral tracking – you can know how far the user scrolled down the
page, and how long it took them to get to that point.

I do think that "display inline, on click" is a reasonable behavior in a
graphical browser, though I personally would rather images load in a
dedicated image viewing tool.

-- 
Jason McBrayer      | “Strange is the night where black stars rise,
jmcbray at carcosa.net | and strange moons circle through the skies,
                    | but stranger still is lost Carcosa.”
                    | ― Robert W. Chambers,The King in Yellow