Comment by yason

As someone who got onto the web in HTML 2.0 era I can feel the appeal of Gemini, although I disagree about their attitude towards static inline images. In day-to-day world that's what separated HTML from the earlier text-based hypertext systems that you could run over a terminal connection (or in a window, like AmigaGuide). You could actually have real documents from the internet, on your own screen, without loading up a word processor. White pages, black text in different sizes, blue links, and color images! Cool!

Obviously, Gemini is a niche that's as futile as it can be. It's like going back to living without a running water because once there was a peaceful village, then first came running water, then electricity, and then the whole village was rebuilt into a big city, and the old village is now gone. But the logic goes: if they didn't get running water in the first place, the people who wanted electricity too wouldn't have moved in, and the city wouldn't have been built. So, reverting back to living without running water now will, if it doesn't maybe demolish the city, at least remind me of the good old days.

The problem with the current web is that before, maybe just 10 years ago, you could use a good browser to remove and disable all the user-hostile cruft aimed at you on websites, and maybe browse pages in relative peace. Now the fight has moved to removing and disabling all the user-hostile cruft aimed at you in the browser, that intend to remove the tools you could use to fight the websites, and given the de-facto monopoly of Google that's just incredibly sad.

What's more demoralising is that it's just one slice in the big trend to erode the concept of ownership alltogether. It's a matter of time until you can no longer even try to own your browsing experience. The web will have changed from a place where people could freely download and view other people's documents over HTTP to people using one-way thin-clients with attestation so that the producer can guarantee their website is interpreted correctly as intended. Good luck writing your own browser that does the right thing for you, it won't be served data off the web unless it can prove the client is unmodified and signed by Microsoft. That is, of course, assuming you could still write code yourself for your computer and actually run it on your own without asking permission from the vendor.

It seems that the 20's answer to what Gemini represents is probably something like asking an AI to load a web page, extract the real contents of the document, possibly with cues from accessibility hints, and reproduce the document as text and still images for viewing.