![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
(We're still fascinated by Project Gemini and still lack access to a gemini web host to be able to respond to blog posts directly, so ... doing it here, sorry.)
There's been a little bit of a conversation happening among the gemlogs that we follow on Project Gemini about the limitations of the standard Gemini markup language. Someone found an old Reddit comment that was contemptuous of its limitations, and (unsurprisingly) a lot of folks who use it regularly wanted to talk about why it's good, actually.
Oddly, though, I don't think we've actually seen any of these posts center the point that caught our attention about the text/gemini format, which is (ironically) a point we've seen made about HTML: you do not have to specify formatting.
Like, in theory, in HTML, you can refuse to say anything about the visual design of the pages you author. You can go:
<html>
<head> <title>My Cool Page</title> </head>
<body>
<p>The stuff I talk about on my cool page.</p>
</body>
</html>...and at no point tell the browser what aesthetic anything should have. You don't have to use CSS, you don't have to use tables, you don't have to specify anything. You can choose not to care about visual appearance. In theory.
In practice? Most of the internet assumes very specific defaults and breaks for any browser that defaults to something outside the scope of its imagination. Yes, someone writing HTML could assume that the browser will make it readable, but that's not really true - anyone who tries to set their HTML browser to always display in dark mode is probably going to have a rough time of it, and they won't know that they can do that on your site.
But in text/gemini, you can't specify the visual design. When you serve files to the Internet via text/gemini, you're not just able to leave that kind of thing unspecified, you're promising that you will because you've chosen to make it impossible for you to specify anything. Which means that Lagrange or GemiNaut or whatever client you actually use can specify the visual design, because they know the pages won't get in the way of them doing so.
Yes, of course text/gemini also makes it a lot easier to program a client. That's a big part of what the spec designers talk about. But artistically? The fact that you can't do full-on web design with text/gemini gives you permission not to care. It gives you permission to say, "The point of this is the words I am writing for you to read; I do not mind one way or another how you choose to read them." You don't have to worry about everything breaking because there's nothing there to break.
If you don't want that, you don't use Project Gemini. If you do, then Project Gemini is a relief.