Gemini* and Gopher

• Personal/Opinions

  • 🔤SpellBinding: DUHORTG Wordo: WHISH

• Technology and Free Software

  • How... How do I think properly? How do YOU think? Share your thinking thoughts!

    Now despite what the title may lead you to believe, this is in fact not a story, but rather an attempt to ask my beloved group of people - internet strangers - on how they think!

    Although there is a reason I'm doing this, see, dear stranger (or strangers!), I'm a programmer by nature, I love coding, I love making things, I love messing around and looking as my computer explodes from having every single one of it's CPU's threads used to print out "Hello!!!!" 20k times a second in a console, though joking aside, one thing which I've noticed about myself is... I don't have a proper mindset when coding

  • Internet/Gemini

    • I'd Still Never Do That (But I Might Do This)

      JBanana stumbled on my post from May 4th about adding scripting to Gemini and wrote a gemlog exploring the idea. Rob S. followed up on his own gemlog.

      Basically, I suggested a way to run scripts in a backwards compatible way using preformatted text blocks. Even though I stressed it was only a thought experiment, I've since received an anonymous comment asking that I not implement scripting in Gemini.

      Don't worry.

      Both JB and RS pointed out security and tracking issues. In my original gemlog, I posited a sandboxed script engine with no access to the network or file system (which would prevent tracking). What could be done in that environment? As JB discovered, not a whole lot. You could roll dice or offer Magic 8 Ball answers with each page refresh. You could display the date in a locale specific format or maybe construct randomized ascii art. How about showing sunrise and sunset times for the browser's locale? Things like that. Not entirely useless but nothing amazing either.

    • Dynamic Content Without The Scripting (Re Gemini Scripting)

      While it is true that clients could support anything they want inside of gemtext, I personally think the spec explicitly disallows this, so it would not be spec-compliant. I don't think changes are actually needed to the spec. The reason why stems from what the blocks are: they are not script blocks, but *preformatted* blocks. And preformatted necessarily implies something that is displayed visually in a raw, already-formatted, form.