Comment by 🚀 clseibold

Yeah, there's other similar opinions I've seen on the web that I think are all dumb. Gemini's not useless. There's also the common misconception that you can't do images and other things over Gemini. Some critiques of Gemini are valid, many others are not :D

A lot of the critiques against Gemini on the web were from people who didn't bother to even look at Gemini long enough to understand how it works in full, so many of them get *a lot* of things wrong.

And then there's the people who are obsessed with HTML and Javascript and think everything should use it. Can't stand these people.

Some critiques almost assume that Gemini is just a markup language, and so when you view Gemini as just a markup language, then of course you would just say "just use HTML 1.1 like the smallweb" or whatever. It's a pretty lazy argument to make.

And then there's the people who like a simpler markup format, but think Gemtext is a little *too* simple. I agree with these people to an extent, I just won't go so far as to say Gemini is dumb or worthless. I just think Gemini could have been done a little better with very little weight added, while still retaining the anti-extensibility goal.

Mar 15 · 9 months ago

4 Later Comments ↓

@HanzBrix To be fair, books *do* use typesets, and bibles use columns. My book of Philo's works also uses columns. Textbooks also like to use sidebars, and sometimes columns too. Some reasons are good, some are annoying, imo, but yeah.

I will admit, though, that some of these features are not used nearly as much as, for example, italics and bold, which are used in literally every single book ever for the past few centuries, at least. But anyways.

I think the important bit that's missing is columns should be a feature clients implement for users who want to read in columns, but strong and emphasis are actual semantic ideas that need to be embedded in the meaning of a text and aren't just arbitrarily placed anywhere.

I would actually think Gemini as an internet file-transfer protocol with a document format should have news media in mind! News media would make sense on gopher/http-esque protocols. Unfortunately, it's not necessarily how Gemini turned out...

@HanzBrix CSS does have some support for columns (see “columns” property in CSS Multi-column Layout Module). But columns are not suitable for digital media, IMO.

@HanzBrix I wouldn’s say CSS is a hack. Layout is absolutely CSS’ domain in HTML, and columns are just presentation.

@HanzBrix Eh, popularity contest is not half bad (assuming anybody is actually listenting…). Designed by committee things were worse 😅

Original Post

Came across this page, found it and the Hacker News discussion it links to pretty interesting. Interesting opinion for sure: [gemini link]