Re: Mercury Protocol
This is a response to solderpunk's new "cornedbeef" post:
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/cornedbeef/the-mercury-protocol.gmi
In a vacuum, I wouldn't be against this idea. It's nice, simple, clean. It's
like Gopher, but better. No weird gophermap syntax, no mixing up 0 and 1-types,
just nice, simple, clean text. The thing is, though, Gopher already exists, and
it seems to be doing fine. It has its shortcomings, yes, but the community is
there and active.
IMO, convincing people to move to Mercury over Gopher is a *lot* harder of a
sell than convincing people to move to Gemini. It's kind of the same problem
with chat protocols. IRC is fine for a lot of people. It wasn't until Discord
came around that people really started leaving IRC in droves, because Discord
was a substansial improvement over the IRC experience with centralized logging,
painless "server" setup, emotes, image uploading, etc. etc. And now, nothing is
going to replace Discord until it can fit Discord's role *but better*.
Mercury is a Gopher replacement. It's not an alternative, it's not a "halfway
between Gopher and HTTP" thing. It serves exactly the same role as Gopher,
except it uses mostly Gemini document syntax. On the otherhand, Gemini is *more*
than that. I know the client certificate stuff is a bit of a pain, but I think
it allows for a *lot* of untapped potential. Maybe there could be a Gemini-
based RSS reader that uses certs to keep track of who's reading what. Imagine
CAPCOM, but with an optional unread message counter. That's neat.
I get that the point of Gopher/Gemini is to just have a simple way to deliver
text. That's fine. This is just my personal thoughts, but I do think that even
Gemini is just "gopher but better". Gemini has a little more going for it, but
there's lots of things about even 90's era HTML that I like. My preferred new
doc format would be something like HTML 3.2 but with CSS as first-class, flex-
box, CSS grid, etc. sort of layout, and a very strong emphasis on readability
and semantics. I like seeing people get creative with layouts, so long as I can
turn them off or override them with my own. Dare I say it, I even like inline
images and links. Gasp.
Snark aside, Gemini interests me because it has the potential to be *more* than
just Gopher but better. That's the bit I'm interested in. Gopher already exists.
Let it be, I'd say. Let Gemini blossom into whatever it wants to be. I like that
text/gemini is fancy plain text. It's a very, very nice property. I would not
be opposed to adding a *few* more line types, still completely optional, but
in a way that progressively enhances a page. I *love* the fact that text/gemini
is *always* readable in a terminal or from the source, in a way that very
accurately reflects what you will see in the browser. I want to see where this
goes.
If Mercury *does* become a thing, I guess it wouldn't be that hard to throw it
in Twin Peaks (my Gemini browser). I'd basically just be copy/pasting the Gemini
code and throwing out some stuff. Any existing Gemini server could just dual-
serve Mercury as well, just the exact same documents. But I doubt anyone would
take any special care to make Mercury-only content, or a Mercury browser that
isn't just bolted onto something else. Maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. Let's see
what happens, I guess.