Exploring Gemini, a modern take on the traditional web document

The growth of the web has come at a cost. Let's rediscover Gopher and Gemini, and discuss the fine line between these protocols, how technology shapes social outcome, and vice versa.

The evolution of the web from documents to applications

The web has evolved significantly, changing from primarily a place to share and reference static documents into a dynamic, interactive, multimedia experience. A lot of what people visit nowadays aren't really "websites" anymore, they are "webapps": applications that just don't need to be installed and are loaded, executed, bit by bit, but with the majority of the processing and storage happening elsewhere.

Along with the rise of web applications came a lot of good, and a lot of bad. It's great that I can sign in anywhere and order groceries to my home. But there's a lot of bad too. Bad like:









Note that not all these Bad Things are because of the growth of web applications. You can still have SaaS and social media without a web app, and the the market will probably still exist.

Achieving the modern web involved the development of technologies like HTTP, TLS, CSS, and JavaScript, and the various web APIs. If I had to point at a single culprit that led us down this path, I'd point at JavaScript.

Some of us watched this gradual process occur. HTML started with the ingredients to be a semantic markup language that separated semantics from style (CSS). Slowly, tables were used for layouts. Images were used for text and layout (remember rounded corners?). Embedded applets and blobs were used for entire navigation sections. The term "Div Soup" was coined. Whether you were conscious of it or not, entire page layouts were redesigned to fit "standardised pixel dimensions" of advertisement banners.

Images were warped into the 1x1 tracking pixel. Hotlinking inline resources meant advertising networks could be setup. CSS improvements meant that simple input forms and documents could now look like complex, interactive applications. SSL/TLS meant that sensitive data could be exchanged and opened the doors to the mass commercialisation of the internet.

The mobile internet brought a short renaissance in lightweight browsing, and the "mobile-first design" paradigm, focusing on the most critical pieces of content first. Developers rediscovered the meaning of [Progressive Enhancement] and the usage of HTML did, for a brief, beautiful moment, shift the needle back towards semantic documents. It wasn't long before that paradigm was replaced with "only available on the app".

Progressive Enhancement

Once JavaScript started maturing, things changed completely. HTML denoted elements that were invisible, and would only appear in certain unknown circumstances. Or content would be missing completely until unknown triggers would load them. The `