Comment by rickcarlino

Comment by rickcarlino 10 hours ago

21 replies

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> Text-based browsers and modern HTML, no success story in sight. Given the progress we see in web technologies, the gap will only widen, so much so that w3m and its friends might fall into oblivion.

This is a fun article and the conclusion is very real.

People shit on Gemini:// because “The web can support text documents”. They say this as if they are actually proposing a real solution. It’s true that the web _can_ support lightweight content (IE5 on Windows 3.1- I was there man), but the problem is that it _won’t_ because it consistently chooses not to. If you’ve ever tried to actually perform this experiment of running the web in text mode you will quickly realize how futile it truly is. Every step you take on a well meaning site like lite.cnn.com is just one click away from transferring you to a bloated SPA app that renders a blank screen on a text-based browser. You can disable JavaScript, or disable images or whatever hoops you want to jump through (increasingly hidden with every FireFox release that goes by) but that’s not going to actually work long term. The web is too extensible and feature hungry to support text based content. It’s better to just use the web for the usual cool shit like WASM and WebRTC or whatever and admit that no one can help themselves and no amount of awareness is going to make the cookie consent banners go away.

Let’s take Gemini more seriously because it already has adoption and it works and it’s not perfect but it sure as fuck isn’t substack.

ploum 7 hours ago

I’m such a Gemini fan that I’m developing a browser which try to extract content from webpages to turn them into Gemini pages ;-)

And it works Offline too by caching every request: https://offpunk.net

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  • anthk 6 hours ago

    Add a limit on catching (requests per second); if not, tons of Gopher servers will kick me out fast by syncing most phlogs in batch mode :)

    Also, there's no way to reuse w3mimgdisplay in the same way w3m works for the web?

    Finally, I can't find a way to display images with 256 colours by default even if the TERM variable it's set to xterm-256color .

    And, no, I can't use sixels by default under OpenBSD's xterm. Sixel and maybe tektroniks support are disabled at build time.

    EDIT: a good start for w3mimgdisplay:

    https://web.archive.org/web/20210920101125/http://blog.z3bra...

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rglullis 8 hours ago

What's the difference between "let's encourage people to create gemini documents" and "let's encourage people to publish text/markdown documents on the www"?

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  • ploum 8 hours ago

    That’s subtle but the Gemtext format is really really constrained, which forces people to do one thing: write text. Nothing else.

    So, when you are on Gemini://, you know that you will only encounter linear text. You will read stuff, written by other people. It is really relaxing. I’m a huge fan of Gemini.

    I would advice to start your Gemini journey by reading links on Antenna and Cosmos (which are link aggregators)

    https://offpunk.net/gemini.html

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    • rglullis 6 hours ago

      > I’m a huge fan of Gemini.

      I'm not. I get the whole "the medium is the message" and why it feels appealing to some, but I don't subscribe to the idea that the only way to have proper digital hygiene is by restraining myself to this ascetic channel. I'd rather encourage more people to put content on the web in whatever form they think is best, and I'll let it up to my user agent to filter out the noise.

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  • wibbily 6 hours ago

    The dream of course would be both: if you’re already writing textual content you might as well publish it on both protocols, so anyone can get to it with any tool they like. Gemtext can be trivially converted up to Markdown, the opposite is lossy but very doable.

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CIPHERSTONE 2 hours ago

Gemini is my go to now when I need a recipe. Pick a recipe site, any recipe site, and its guaranteed to be the most painful experience on mobile, and slightly less painful on a laptop experience you have on the web. Pure fucking trash. And if you happen to be a recipe publisher who does this and is reading this, fuck you.

Enter Gemini. It consistently can give me a text only version of the recipe that I can copy into a notes app if I want with zero pain. Zero. Now I have my own set of "wtf are you doing Gemini" and "why are you halucinating on this request" experiences at work with Gemini, but recipe extraction.. the goat.

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  • fenwick67 21 minutes ago

    Wrong Gemini, the above poster is talking about the protocol, you are talking about the LLM

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qznc 6 hours ago

I really like reading text with variable-width fonts. Gemini requires fixed-width fonts due to its terminal-based approach. Thus, I have no desire to use it ever.

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  • ploum 3 hours ago

    No. There are graphical browser like Lagrange. It is up to you.

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  • SuperNinKenDo 5 hours ago

    I've only dabbled in Gemini so I don't know their names off the top of my head, but I tried out a number of GUI Gemini browsers in the past, and they're quite nice. Easy on the eyes, simple design, all the variable width fonts you could ask for if that's your bag.

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harendra007 9 hours ago

Quick question on gemini://, I have no idea what gemini:// is but I typed gemini:// on my mac and it prompted to open my iterm shell. Is this a normal behavior, I am using chrome browser.

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  • ks2048 8 hours ago

    There's a tool called lsregister on macOS to show claimed schemes for different apps. Mine shows for iTerm2,

        claimed schemes:            ftp:, gemini:, gopher:, http:, https:, iterm2:, mailto:, news:, nntp:, ssh:, telnet:, titan:, wais:, whois:, x-man-page:
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    • ploum 8 hours ago

      Probably because you could install Terminal Gemini clients like Amfora or Offpunk.

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thunderbong 9 hours ago

Totally valid points.

By the way, only on re-reading your comment, I realised you're taking about the Gemini protocol and not the AI engine!

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esseph 9 hours ago

Hmmm

I have no idea how this would work just brainstorming.

Could you.. use some browser backend to render the page to a PDF, then an LLM to scrape the content and display it as text?

I know it wouldn't be exactly efficient, but...

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  • ploum 3 hours ago

    So you mean that someone use LLM to generate a website full of JS, post a text in it and then we use LLM to try to rebuild the original content?

    If only we had a way to just share text without all those steps…

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  • worksonmine 8 hours ago

    A more pragmatic approach would be to run the content through something like readability[0] but leaves navigation untouched. The AI could hallucinate and add content that isn't in the original, something accessibility tools don't.

    [0]: https://github.com/mozilla/readability

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    • ploum 8 hours ago

      This is exactly what Offpunk is doing: displaying the html page after it passed throught Readability.

      https://offpunk.net

      The whole page is still available with "view full" (or "v full")

      In the current trunk, if configured, it uses ftr-site-config rules to extract content for specific websites ( https://github.com/fivefilters/ftr-site-config )

      I do 90% of my browsing using Offpunk (reading blogs and articles) and, suprizingly, it often works better than a graphical browser (no ads, no popup, no paywall). Of course, it doesn’t work when you really needs JS.

      Reply View 1 reply
      • anthk 6 hours ago

        Dillo uses something similar with rdrview, you can use rdrview://$URL (altough I hacked the dpi plugin to use the rd:// 'protocol' for shortness).

        It lacks the filter thingy but now has the dilloc tool where it can print the current URL, open a new page... and with sed you can trivially reopen a page with an alternative from https://farside.link

        You know, medium.com -> scribe.rip and the like.

        But Dillo is not a terminal browser, altough it's a really barebones one and thanks to DPI and dilloc it can be really powerful (gopher, gemini, ipfs, man, -info in the future) and so on available as simple plugins, either in sh, C or even Go) and inspiring for both offpunk and w3m (where it has similar capabilities as Dillo to print/mangle URL's and the like).

        What I'd love is to integrate Apertium (or any translating service) with Dillo as a plugin so by just running trans://example.com you could get any page translated inline without running tons of Google propietary JS to achieve the same task.

        I love the https://linux.org.ru forum and often they post interesting setups but I don't speak Russian.

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