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What do you think of alternatives to the web like Gemini and Gopher? (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 day ago by to c/asklemmy@lemmy.world
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I discovered Gemini in 2023 and really enjoy it. I like the minimalism. I like that page presentation is up to the user. I've even come to appreciate the line-based nature of its markup, because theoretically at least, it means a screen reader user knows that elements are always arranged top to bottom.

I say "theoretically" since I have yet to run into an accessible Gemini browser for Windows, which is unfortunate since Gemini's whole deal is text first.

And to head off the inevitable comment about Linux, in order to have an accessible app you need an accessible OS for it to sit on top of.

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[–] [S] 14 points 1 day ago (6 children)

Gopher predates the WWW (at least to market) but ended up losing out to it.

Gemini is a spiritual successor to Gopher born out of dissatisfaction with the state of the modern web. Everything about it is deliberately, almost aggressively minimalist, to a degree that will likely put off many. But it's meant to be human-scale, the technical details are something a technically inclined person can wrap their head around in its entirety.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 day ago* (4 children)

    FYI your Gopher link doesn't work for some reason (or not for me, anyway)

    When I copy the link it comes up as:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol

    I guess the missing bracket at the end is the issue, but not sure.

    This works for me, so in case it helps anyone else... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)

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  • [–] 3 points 1 day ago (3 children)

    Yeah, Markdown's link syntax uses round brackets to enclose the URL, so some clients will think the URL is complete as soon as they encounter a closing bracket, but URLs can actually contain round brackets themselves.

    The URL can be enclosed in angle brackets to avoid this:

    [Gopher](<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)>)

    Which gives this: Gopher

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (2 children)

    I never knew about the angle bracket option; do you know if that’s fairly widely accepted among the different markdown variants?

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  • [–] 2 points 1 day ago (1 child)

    It's part of CommonMark, so should be almost universally accepted: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#link-destination

    But perhaps worth adding that the angle brackets are arguably the canonical way of designating a URL in CommonMark in general.

    So, you know how on Lemmy (and many other places), you can just paste a URL and it's automatically turned into a clickable <a/> element? Yeah, that isn't part of CommonMark.
    Instead, you're supposed to wrap the URL with angle brackets:

    <https://example.com/>

    Which turns into: https://example.com/

    Here's the spec for that: https://spec.commonmark.org/0.31.2/#autolink

    Frankly, I only know that, because mdBook doesn't create links from just a pasted URL, it requires the angle brackets or the []() syntax.
    (Kind of fair, since it's for writing proper documents, but it does keep tripping me up.)

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