Comment by mattlondon
3 hours ago
Not quite. I think Gemini has deliberately gone for a "text only" philosophy, which I think is very constraining.
The early web had a lot going on and allowed for a lot of creative experimentation which really caught the eye and the imagination.
Gemini seems designed to only allow long-form text content. You can't even have a table let alone inline images which makes it very limited for even dry scientific research papers, which I think would otherwise be an excellent use-case for Gemini. But it seems that this sort of thing is a deliberate design/philosophical decision by the authors which is a shame. They could have supported full markdown, but they chose not to (ostensibly to ease client implementation but there are a squillion markdown libraries so that assertion doesn't hold water for me)
It's their protocol so they can do what they want with it, but it's why I think Gemini as a protocol is a dead-end unless all you want to do is write essays (with no images or tables or inline links or table-of-contents or MathML or SVG diagrams or anything else you can think of in markdown). Its a shame as I think the client-cert stuff for Auth is interesting.
It’s tough but one of the tenets of Gemini is that a lone programmer can write their own client in a spirited afternoon/weekend. Markdown is just a little too hard to clear the bar. Already there was much bellyaching on the mailing list about forcing dependence on SSL libraries; suggesting people rely on more libraries would have been a non-starter
Note that the Gemini protocol is just a way of moving bytes around; nothing stops you from sending Markdown if you want (and at least some clients will render it - same with inline images).
There are images in geminispace, and audio, and (probably) video. It's just not inline. One of constraints of the protocol is that pages cannot load content without your express say-so.