Gemini pages aren’t programs that run in your browser like most modern websites are; they’re just text with a little formatting, so there are no surprises. Once you know how one Gemini page works, you know how they all work.
Okay but that sounds dumb.
there are no in-line images
:wut:
Gemini has no support for caching, compression, or resumption of interrupted downloads. As such, it’s not very well suited to distributing large files, for values of “large” which depend upon the speed and reliability of your network connection.
Gemini is a “less is more” reaction against web browsers and servers becoming too complicated and too powerful.
It’s a cute system but I don’t see how it would ever gain any traction. There isn’t even a web hosted view of the source code repository. Also it’s a text-based protocol which is like the worst part of HTTP+HTML.
My gripe with text-based stuff is it only benefits developers who want to look at stuff in debug tools (in the browser, since the packets are encrypted). For everything else it’s just a nuisance and takes way more computational power and takes up more space.
It also makes parsing more complex because text has a character set and there’s lots of weird little things about text parsing. It also leads to specifications being under-specified, and makes it easier to have security vulnerabilities, etc. Binary protocols are usually a lot more well-defined, because they have to be. Look at how long DNS, SSL/TLS, and almost every binary file format (PNG, JPEG, etc.) have been working for. Then look at how many text-based protocols have lots of incompatible implementations/features: XML, HTML, JavaScript, HTTP headers, markdown, GLSL, etc. have all had parsing and feature incompatibilities. You can’t really have incompatibilities with binary protocols because you can’t just shove more text in between other stuff. Extensibility has to be explicitly provided for in a binary protocol.
Binary protocols are also just easier to implement, even though people think the opposite. It’s so much easier to read a series of integer values from a byte array than trying to parse text in a specific format. I was able to write a basic WAV file parser really easily, but writing a parser for anything requires a lot more thought.
Text formats also have the problem that you can’t always efficiently include binary data inside them. Encoding stuff in base 64 is really inefficient.
