Comment by 🚀 stack
The protocol is the same for making beer. The difference is in the subleties. Same with wine.
A good browser has way more to do with usability and human interface than the text transmission protocol.
Mar 25 · 6 weeks ago
3 Later Comments ↓
🚀 lars_the_bear · Mar 25 at 17:46:
@stack : fair enough -- I don't know much about brewing beer.
Still, it does seem correct to me to say that -- broadly speaking -- there's less need for a browser to be easy to implement and maintain, if the protocol doesn't change. Sure, you'll have to fix bugs and, sure, people will think of ways to improve the user experience. But we won't have that constant, brutal, relentless maintenance and expansion burden that we have with regular web browsers.
In essence, I'm not sure why "do it in a weekend" was ever a design goal -- even though it goes back to the earliest days of Gemini. And I'm not sure it's realistic, anyway.
@eugene Reasonable question, but I think you underestimate how many niches for a client there are. The space of possible clients is high-dimensional, so has many extreme points. I can easily think of more than 5 clients none of which is made redundant by another. We have different incompatible UI modes -- graphical, TUI, CLI, with further subdivisions possible, e.g. interactive vs non-interactive CLI. Then niche devices -- e.g. Amigas, e-book readers. Then there are niches for optimising for minimal resource use or minimal installation requirements. I'm sure there are also unexplored possibilities -- audio-only clients, say -- and the future will presumably bring new needs and possibilities.
🚀 lars_the_bear · Mar 25 at 18:45:
@mbays : I'm sure everything you say is true. And yet I'm not sure I believe that (say) Amiga support was part of the founding intention of Gemini. I think it's more likely that @skyjake is right (in a post on Station, as I recall): by making it easy to write clients, everybody would write one, and this would make it even harder to change the protocol.
While there are going to be niche applications, and there's always work to do to fix bugs and so on, if there had been one decent client for Windows, one for MacOS, and one for Windows, that would have satisfied most people's needs for years to come. There never was a need to write a client in a weekend.
Original Post
A paradox — I'm sure that the answer I seek might be found by reading into the archives of the original mailing list, however, I don't have the time for that right now, so I'll have to resort to being wrong in public, surely someone will correct me. So I've been meaning to ask. One of the major stated goals of Gemini is simplicity. A major big idea is to make writing a browser in a high level language easy, and a lot of thought went specifically into making this easy. Another major stated...