New Blog Post

New blog post talking about the possibility of gemini style sheets.

breebee.smol.pub/gemini_style_sheets_07_14_2025

#blog_update

🐡 Breebee [it/its]

2025-07-14 · 10 months ago · 🙁 3

13 Comments ↓

☀️ sbr · 2025-07-14 at 18:59:

think of the children!!!

🦂 zzo38 · 2025-07-14 at 19:05:

Personally, I do not use favicons and do not want favicons nor style sheets. I also dislike adding too many extra files (although another place to store data is in the X.509 certificate, if necessary; this way a client does not have to make another request to check whether or not the file is present). What might potentially be useful is to be able to specify fonts for character sets that the client does not already have suitable fonts for (but only if the user explicitly decides to use it; the user can always configure their own fonts).

❄ DJ8000 · 2025-07-15 at 00:31:

i think we should develop a more screenplay like appraoch to blogging (red text) (heavily underlined)

🐦 aven · 2025-07-15 at 01:02:

I'm kind of conflicted about it. On the one hand i realy like how gemeni is a protocol strictly for text content that the client can format and style however they like. Although, i do find myself upset when the randomly selected color scheme for a capsule on lagrange doesn't seem to fit the vibe of the content. In the end i would probably be brought to turn it off anyway since someone could always pick a bright, obnoxious color scheme that would blind me reading at night.

👾 jecxjo · 2025-07-15 at 03:06:

Honestly I like that the protocol is the protocol, and the content is the file you download. Being able to create simple clients that just need to open a socket and download something and throw it up on your terminal window is a breath of fresh air.

I just tried reading a blog on one of those Posts as a Service sites like Medium. CDN was failing to get a JS and CSS file and the page would only partially load. All I wanted was the text. I don't need fancy colors or fonts or moving pictures. Just the text.

🛰️ repeater · 2025-07-15 at 09:15:

One vote against this, I'm afraid. Feature creep is not what I want in Gemini. If we were to get new features, I'd prefer basic protocol enhancements before anything else (such as content size headers).

🛸 bluesman · 2025-07-15 at 12:23:

I think it would be better and wouldn't break the spec to give the user a per page styling preference. I thought about doing this in Alhena. The ability to set the color and font tied to the domain (or even page). I haven't done this because it kind of breaks theming. What looks good in one theme may look awful in another. Hmm. Perhaps styling tied to domain and theme.

☀️ sbr · 2025-07-15 at 12:50:

Lagrange kind of supports that, as you can set the theme pallete seed per page, click on the padlock, settings and type something in. Its dynamically built from the hostname but if you find something you like you can use it elsewhere.

🚀 StaticCut · 2025-07-15 at 21:57:

The core issue seems to be Lagrange's inconsistent/random coloring rather than a fundamental limitation of gemini. Instead of adding CSS complexity, would it make more sense for Lagrange to use consistent, well-designed defaults?

A client with beautiful, clean typography would achieve the same goal - pleasant, readable content - without protocol changes. Adding GSS would likely create two problems: (1) it's not full CSS, so sites will look amateurish anyway, and (2) every capsule will have different styling, making the reading experience inconsistent and potentially less accessible than uniform, well-designed client defaults. It seems like the random colors are the problem here, not the lack of author control.

🛸 bluesman · 2025-07-15 at 22:07:

This thread got me thinking. Although it won't help the legions of Lagrange users, I think I'm going to add this to Alhena if I can find a decent color picker. I would probably tie it to the current theme as well as domain so the user could create settings that don't clash with the overall application theme.

Since Alhena lets you use any font installed on the system, you could also (in theory) apply different fonts for for the different gemtext line types. I'll have to think about that one.

🦂 zzo38 · 2025-07-15 at 22:14:

I think that:

🛰️ repeater · 2025-07-15 at 22:14:

@StaticCut: You can disable per-page colors in Lagrange. Set both of the light and dark page colors to "Sepia". (Dark mode will still work.) Other options may work too.

💀 requiem · 2025-07-20 at 23:15:

Use ANSI in preformatted text blocks.

But no, please don’t force styling on me. I want to keep Gemini readable.