> There are still a large number of people creating blogs and websites without analytics etc., and with no expectation of being able to monetize their work.
Gemini is a social space as well as a protocol. Part of why it's got such a sharp break with HTTP than e.g. being a subset of HTTP with a special client, is to demarcate such a space for those who want it. Minimal websites still operate within the larger context of the HTTP web, where this demarcation doesn't exist. Click a link to a Facebook profile from that small blog and you've unwittingly chosen to load half a megabyte of markup and tracking scripts. This is not possible with Gemini because such a capability simply is outside the protocol.
I agree that this could be annoying. Gemini has support for alternate mimetypes, so it's possible to return Markdown to the client. I think that Markdown is still in the spirit of Gemini's minimalism, but it does support more things (including tables). If a particular client refuses to render markdown, it's still readable as plaintext.
Gemini is a social space as well as a protocol. Part of why it's got such a sharp break with HTTP than e.g. being a subset of HTTP with a special client, is to demarcate such a space for those who want it. Minimal websites still operate within the larger context of the HTTP web, where this demarcation doesn't exist. Click a link to a Facebook profile from that small blog and you've unwittingly chosen to load half a megabyte of markup and tracking scripts. This is not possible with Gemini because such a capability simply is outside the protocol.
> But even danluu occasionally uses tables and images. https://danluu.com/cli-complexity/ https://danluu.com/branch-prediction/ . I think these articles would be made worse if these features were removed.
I agree that this could be annoying. Gemini has support for alternate mimetypes, so it's possible to return Markdown to the client. I think that Markdown is still in the spirit of Gemini's minimalism, but it does support more things (including tables). If a particular client refuses to render markdown, it's still readable as plaintext.