Can Project Gemini rewind the Web thirty years?

TL;DR -- the Web isn't broken: we are.

If you're older than about forty, it's hard to deny that, with the modern World-Wide Web, we've created a monster. It's particularly galling for those of us who were there when our creation tore the electrodes off its head and shambled off to the village. After all, we thought we were taking part in something that would make the world a better place. The modern Web, though, completely fails to live up to our ideals. It's like little desert islands of information surrounded by fathomless oceans of cruft -- beeping, flashing garbage that has no purpose other than to destroy our privacy and sell us advertising. Who would have imagined, thirty years ago, that "clickbait" would be a thing? The amount of our precious energy resources that are being wasted in showing unsolicited video loops on billions of browsers hardly bears thinking about.

If you're under forty, most likely you never even think about this, much less think it's a problem. My kids think that getting all your information surrounded by invitations to waste your money on anatomical enhancements is scarcely even worthy of note. It's part of the fabric of everyday life, as is the fact that vast mega-corporations are following our every move. Those of us who do see the problem -- and, thankfully, that number is increasing -- do little except wring our hands.

So Project Gemini provides some grounds for cautious optimism. Gemini is an attempt to rewind the Web by thirty years, and keep it there. Even if Gemini is not successful in itself -- and I shall be arguing that there are good reasons to think it won't be -- its very existence shows that there are at least some people who are trying to take action.

The Gemini principle

To a large extent, the World-Wide Web has become a victim of its own flexibility. Back in the 90s, web browsers and servers observed a very simple, stateless communication protocol (HTTP), and understood a very simple, text-based document format (HTML).

For better or worse, both HTTP and HTML turned out to be highly adaptable. New features -- JavaScript, cookies, in-line video streams, session management, etc., etc. -- were added because they could be. These features allowed the Web to be used in ways beyond the wildest dreams of its founders, but also paved the way for the intrusive commercialization that is grinding it down.

What Gemini sets out to do is to define a protocol and a document format that are very restrictive, and non-extensible. Lack of extensibility is usually seen as a bad thing in the computing industry but here -- or so Gemini enthusiasts maintain -- it is foundational. The Gemini protocol provides just enough flexibility to allow the storage, retrieval and indexing of documents, and absolutely nothing else. Gemini is actually simpler than the very earliest Web standards -- more akin to the old Gopher system than to a modern Web protocol.

Gemini does not set out to supplant the modern Web, but merely to be alternative to it for some use-cases. It's never going to be a practical way to provide a very interactive user experience -- but that is seen as a feature, not a defect.

One of the great advantages of Gemini is that both clients and servers are easy to implement. Modern Web browsers are things of staggering complexity, requiring huge resources to develop and maintain. They sometimes turn out to have privacy-damaging defects that take even their maintainers by surprise.

Gemini, by contrast, is specified in such a limited way that a workable client can be hacked up in an afternoon, and fully understood by any competent programmer -- or so, at least, is claimed.

Incidentally, the name "Gemini" relates to the US space mission, not to astrology or Greek mythology. The project has accumulated a whole array of twee, spaced themed names -- the Gemini analog of a website is called a "capsule", for example. In a way, this naming choice is a little unfortunate, as web searches produce far more links to astrology sites than anything else.

At the time of writing there are estimated to be 500-1000 distinct capsules -- not a large number compared to the size of the Web, but usage seems to be increasing fairly rapidly. There are a couple of search engines but it's likely that not all sites, sorry capsules, are indexed.

The Gemini protocol

Gemini uses a simple request-response protocol, a little like HTTP/0.9. Each request is expected to be completely self-contained, and result in the delivery of exactly one document, and an accompanying MIME type. There is no provision for adding new meta-data to the protocol -- there is nothing analogous to HTTP's custom request headers, for example. The completely rigid protocol specification means that the server cannot even tell the client how much data to expect in response. If, the maintainers argue, we are prepared to add that feature to the protocol, where will it end? With covert bitcoin mining and tracking cookies, just as we have now, presumably. No -- better to resist anything that steps even slightly away from the core protocol, which is considered to be feature-complete, and set in stone.

One slightly anomalous aspect of the protocol is that it is expected to be carried over an encrypted TLS session. The use of TLS has potential advantages for privacy, of course, compared to plain-text delivery. The maintainers concede that the reliance on TLS makes Gemini essentially inaccessible to older computers -- TLS libraries are not available for most non-contemporary computing devices, and implementing TLS completely from scratch is not a prospect anybody wants to think about.

So, in a sense, Gemini is a very simple protocol carried over a very complicated one. The mandatory use of TLS is, perhaps, the most controversial part of Gemini. It's not the most troubling aspect, to my mind, but it's certainly an odd choice, and one whose justifications I don't find particularly compelling.

The Gemini document format

In keeping with the simplicity of the protocol, Gemini's standard document format -- "Gemtext" -- is also very simplistic. It's a text-based format, with a tiny amount of formatting markup allowed. You can express headings, lists, and block quotes, and mark certain sections as pre-formatted. You can include links, one to a line. And that's it. There's no way to emphasise sections of text, or include any non-text content inline. There's no tables, text size control, footnotes, underlining, internal links, superscripts or subscripts, or any high-level layout control.

Another slightly odd design choice is that the document format must be line-per-paragraph. That is, each paragraph that is to be rendered as a discrete block of text must be written as one single, probably very long, line. So while Gemini documents can, in principle, be produced using nothing but a text editor, most text editors will struggle with lines hundreds of words long.

There's no doubt that using the Gemtext document format does force the writer to focus on what is important. Whether the format is rich enough for practical application, though, remains to be seen.

Why I don't think it's a winner, in the end

It gives me no pleasure to say this, but I don't see Gemini being a long-term success, although it's certainly had a larger measure of success than most similar ventures. It's true that I haven't spend a huge amount of time playing with Gemini, although I've tried writing content for it, and I've even written my own client for Linux. It seems to me that the Gemini founders have thrown out the baby with the bathwater. Whether it's possible to throw out the bathwater of the modern Web without also throwing out the baby is arguable, but this particular baby is bobbing merrily through the drainage system (I wish I hadn't thought of it in those terms -- that's an image that's going to stick with me).

Less gruesomely, It seems to me that Gemini removes so much from existing Web technologies that is useful, that what we're left with is impoverished.

Consider the Gemtext format, for example. Like many people who understood the implications, I cringed when people started to use HTML tables to do page layout. Tables were intended originally for presenting tabular data, but it didn't take long for authors to realize that they could also be used for controlling page flow. As soon as that happened, the distinction between semantic and presentational markup collapsed.

The Gemini forums have many conversations about how tables could be introduced into Gemtext but, knowing what happened with HTML, everybody is wary of the unintended consequences. But leaving aside complex matters like tables, do we really want a document format that does not allow for text emphasis? It's become conventional in publishing -- online and print -- to use monospace fonts to indicate a computer term, like this. In HTML, we can use the <code> tag for this purpose. This is pure semantic markup -- the author does not control how the viewer will see the text. Most web browsers follow the convention and render this text in a monospace font, but that isn't because the document says so. The document only indicates the purpose of the text, not the presentation.

The Gemini people want to maintain a clean separation between content and presentation, and that seems a laudable goal to me. However, the Gemtext document format does not provide even for semantic markup, beyond headings and lists. When a markup language offers fewer semantic possibilities than even a dumb terminal can render into presentation, something has to be wrong.

The impoverished nature of the markup language has an important practical consequence -- it's impossible automatically to convert HTML documents to Gemext. In fact, it's impossible even to convert Markdown, and that's much simpler than HTML. It's impossible because the near-total absence of semantic markup means that, in practice, text has to be rewritten.

If I'm writing for a medium where I know that only plain, unformatted text is allowed, I express myself accordingly. Here's an example. In legal writing, it's common to use italic text to denote the names of parties to legal cases, particularly when they are abbreviated. I might write:

In Bloggs the Supreme Court held that...

The use of italic text here makes it clear to the reader that I'm referring to a case, and probably to one that I described in full earlier. Without the italic, it makes no sense, and I'd have to give the case parties in full. It's not a problem, but it's it's not a conversion that can safely be made automatically.

Or, again, when writing about programming, I rely on being able to use markup to distinguish the use of computing terms from regular English words -- it's hugely confusing the the reader otherwise. I can rephrase the text to make the distinction clear, but that's the problem I have to rephrase the text.

I tried to convert some of the articles on this site to Gemtext and, although it was possible, it was by no means automatic. I had to do a fair amount of re-writing, to account for the fact that I can't rely on markup.

That's fine (perhaps) for content that is being created from scratch, for a particular medium. And, perhaps, Gemini is primarily intended for content that is ephemeral -- blogs, perhaps. That does seem to account for most of the existing content. However, I can't help thinking that it would have encouraged content generation if we were able to convert existing documents, or at least use some of the features of existing document formats. None of the markup I want to use -- text emphasis, subscripts and superscripts, inline static images -- seems to me to be the thin end of a wedge. Rather, it seems essential.

Another problem -- and one that might solve itself in time -- is the lack of hosting support. Because it uses a specific protocol, regular web servers can't host Gemini content. If there are any commercial hosting operations at present, I couldn't find any. The Gemini documentation says that it's possible to run a Gemini server on a Raspberry Pi attached to a home broadband router. This is, indeed, possible, and nicely decentralized and democratic. Right now, however, I'm not keen on exposing my home to the public Internet via a server that is a long way from being battle-hardened.

A number of enthusiasts are sharing their own infrastructure which, again, is very public-spirited. However, I'm not sure how well such an approach would scale.

These are all technical problems, though, and probably can be solved. Unfortunately, the real problem here isn't technical at all.

There really is a problem, but it doesn't have a technological solution

It should be clear from other articles on this site that I'm an enthusiast for old-timey computing technology. I'm all for simplicity and getting back to a time when we actually understood the software we used. But I'm also a pragmatist -- even when things were better in the past, we don't always have a clear way back there, and trying often causes more problems than it solves.

And here, I think, is where Gemini comes unstuck. It's trying to solve a problem technologically, when the problem is not actually technological. The fact is, there's nothing wrong with HTTP or HTML. Really, there isn't. That fact that these things can be, and often are, abused does not make it inevitable. This website does not carry any advertising; it doesn't issue tracking cookies or spy pixels; it's doesn't mine bitcoin or show always-on video loops. Nobody, except perhaps your ISP, is recording that you looked at this page. I do use JavaScript on some of my pages -- I use the amazing MathJAX utility for formatting mathematical formulae. I don't like to think about the amount of work that would be involved in writing this article without it.

HTML doesn't have to be complicated, or rely on complicated features. I write every word on this website using the vi text editor, and most of it can be rendered by a console-based browser like lynx (I check this). If you take away the stylesheets, the articles are still readable (I check this, too). Enthusiasts for simple web formats complain that HTML is unreadable and, in its modern rendering, it is. But a document that contains more text than cruft is perfectly manageable -- tell your browser to "view source" on this page, and you'll see that it's just text, with a few links at the top and bottom. There's nothing about HTML that makes it necessarily over-complicated.

Nor is there anything about the HTTP protocol that makes abuse inevitable. It's very good at being a lightweight, stateless alternative to FTP, which is how it was originally conceived.

The Gemini folks deliberately rejected using a defined sub-set of HTML for their document format. The reasons given don't seem to stand up to detailed scrutiny and, to be honest, I suspect the real motivation is to make a clean break with current practice. Since the Gemini founders realized that everything would have to be done again from scratch, they had a strong reason to keep everything very simple. Unfortunately, it's too feature-poor to be useful.

The reason my website doesn't have any tracking cookies, or advertising, or any of that stuff, is that I don't want them. I don't need to generate revenue with this site -- I hope at least a few people find it useful but, in the end, it's vanity publishing. Would organizations that do rely on making revenue from their websites voluntarily embrace a technology that prohibits them from doing so? It doesn't seem very likely. Will people who aren't trying to monetize their writing use a technology that is somewhat awkward to use, and offers so few expressive possibilities? That, I don't know.

While I have enormous respect for the vision and drive of the people working on Gemini, I don't think it's going to get us to where we need to be. That's because it's trying to solve a human problem using technological means. We need a social and ethical solution instead.

Part of that solution, I believe, depends on educating people, from an early age, that our capitalist system does not provide anything of value for nothing. Or, more pithily -- if you're not the customer, you're the product. If we want decent online content, we need to be prepared to pay for it. In the early days of the web there was no technology that would have made that possible, and the dominant funding model of the Web became one based on selling advertising. All the nastiness of the modern web follows from the fact that we think we can have something for nothing, and we can't.

Where next?

I really believe that there is a place for a "small web". I would like to see, for example, a search engine that can be asked to prioritize sites that don't issue cookies, or tracking pixels, or show unsolicited video advertisements. I don't know if such an assessment could be made automatically by a search engine, but I suspect it's possible. Of course, there is no incentive for any search operator to provide such a service, because the sites we'd be demoting are exactly the ones that provide the search operators their revenue.

In my view, what will clean up the Web in the end is a "micropayment" model. If I could choose to see a sanitized, advertisement-free version of a Web site by making a one-off payment of, say, 0.1p, I probably would. Many people probably would. The technology to manage payments of this size now exists, although it's not the way that subscription currently works. We can really only remove the ghastly cruft from the Web if we remove the need for it and, for better or worse, we can only do that by finding some other way for content creators to make money. By convincing ourselves that this was not the case, we got the Web we deserved.