Comment by wibbily
2 hours ago
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).
Didn't the creator of the protocol go on a rant when someone made a browser for Gemini that included a favicon?
I can't imagine the backlash if someone tried to normalize Markdown. Isn't the entire point of Gemini that it can never be extended or expanded upon?
Maybe it would be better to create an entirely different protocol/alt web around Markdown that didn't risk running afoul of Gemini's philosophical restrictions?
I think a "markdown-web" that uses some of the Gemini approaches for privacy and auth/identity etc would be pretty nice.
Of course, as others have said, we could just use HTML without JavaScript or cookies and we'd be a lot of the way there with 95% less effort but hey in the future we'll probably just query an AI rather than load a web page ourselves.