Gemini loses out on the best part of the web

Gemini is nice because it makes it almost impossible to make bad websites. The problem is, it makes it almost impossible to make good websites, either.

Essentially, gemini supports one sort of site: the slither-of-text receipt down the middle of the page ,like this one you’re reading. It focuses on putting textual content front and centre. That’s really great, because i love reading what people have to say, and gemini is a very low friction way to actually just write stuff.

But gemini is also very stringent. The spec doesn’t specify whether images can be loaded inline, and some clients do that, but other people are very vocal about the fact that this is wrong. That means that anyone wanting to share their art or photography already has a barrier between their creations and the people who want to see them.

Furthermore, gemini proponents often talk about its accessibility, stemming from the simple, semantic markup. But the markup is limited, and the inability to guarantee inline images means that i’ve seen a huge amount of ascii art headers and diagrams in the wild, which are horrible to deal with using a screen reader.

On the one hand, i like sites that stick only to the content, don’t abuse old tags for stylistic reasons, and all. And i like sites that are low on javascript, and work well in dillo, netsurf, and the like. But on the other hand, these sites have no personality. The web is such a creative medium and it all gets thrown out for purity. I love old-style sites with a few columns, badges, table layouts, background images, and interactive sparkles following my mouse using javascript. These sites have character.

Gemini is nice, and its simplicity mean that a huge community has sprung up around it that never existed with gopher. But it’s stringent, and forces sites to be a very particular way. Big businesses are never going to move to gemini, which means it’s a niche hobby community. But you know where there was already a niche hobby community? On the world wide web! You just have to look for it, and you can find plenty of sites which look like gemini sites, or act like gemini sites, being mostly text with no tracking or adverts, but also the conveniences and flexibility that html and css provide. Html and css are creative and i love them for that, because i love doing weird stuff, and seeing other people’s weird stuff.

Gemini is like a typewriter. The documents are consistent, and it’s productive. But html and css are like a paintbox, where people can do what they want, and sure, you can make stuff that isn’t very friendly, but you can also make some really beautiful things that the constraints of a typewriter would never allow.

That’s why this page is a receipt. I want to have the vibe of gemini, but with the flexibility and universality of html.