# Small Internet Instead of Small Web (created Wed, Mar 3, 2021) The Small Internet might include these application layer protocols: * email * IRC * Gopher * Gemini * web (the small web parts whatever that means) The Kristall internet browser can access Gopher, Finger, Gemini, and http/https. It supports a subset of HTML. Kristall does not display embedded images and videos. Pages can link to images, and Kristall will display the images once the links have been clicked. When clicking on heavy content within the Castor Gemini browser, the browser will open the heavy content within the appropriate applications, installed on the operating system. The methods for viewing heavy content on Gemini depends upon the Gemini browsers. When viewing the web within Kristall, all websites look the same, since Kristall users control the typography within Kristall. Of course, all Gopher and Gemini sites look the same. For personal sites, I prefer email as the lo-fi commenting system. I'm fine with using the mutt email client in a terminal, but I mostly use the Fastmail web-based email client. I use Fastmail to host my custom email address. Feeds and feed-reading are not restricted to the web. Many Gopher and Gemini sites provide feeds. Aggregator services on those protocols consume feeds. For feed-reading, I occasionally log into my account at theoldreader.com. I also created my own simple web-based feed-reading app that I adapted to Gemini. I consume Gemini feeds and web feeds on the Gemini version of my basic feed-reading app. I'm only a lightweight user of feed-reading. I also like to subscribe to email newsletters. I don't have a preference. Feeds and email newsletters have pros and cons. Obviously, IRC provides a real-time, synchronous commenting or communication system, but that does not interest me as it relates to personal site publishing. It's a nice option to use for projects or communities. I prefer the Slow Internet Movement of taking time to craft replies on our own personal sites and then emailing authors the links that point to the reply posts. => https://sawv.org/2017/04/27/lofi-approach-to-accepting-comments-on-a-personal-website.html => gemini://sawv.org/2020/06/17/lofi-approach-to-accepting-comments-on-a-personal-gemsite.gmi To access Gemini content without using a Gemini browser, here's a web proxy that displays Gemini content. => https://portal.drewdevault.com/x/sawv.org/2020/06/17/lofi-approach-to-accepting-comments-on-a-personal-gemsite.gmi Recently, I've spent a fair bit of time, pondering Len's web design philosophy and his criticisms of Gemini. => http://len.falken.ink Len's homepage is also his RSS feed, which is a unique idea. I don't know of any other websites that use this setup. Some IndieWeb.org supporters use their homepages as h-feed files. => https://indieweb.org/h-feed In recent months in Gemini land, users have adopted a Gemini feed format, and they structure the links to the posts on their homepages in this manner. They may also produce feeds in one of the XML formats, but more feed reading apps on Gemini support the "gemfeed" format too. => gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/companion/subscription.gmi Len uses a minimal setup within his RSS file, similar to how most Gemini users include only a small amount of content within their feed files, mainly titles, dates, and links. Len's article pages consist of plain, raw text with no HTML. He described his web design philosophy and his tech choices in this post. => http://len.falken.ink/misc/writing-for-the-internet-across-a-human-lifetime.txt > http://len.falken.ink is an RSS feed of my writing which never has to be visited twice. With an RSS reader, readers only need my URL to begin receiving my posts, and at any time, can revoke their subscription on their terms. > No one needs special software to establish a push-based publishing system as I have here. RSS is well supported, and so is plain text. Using monospace fonts, it is possible to create multi-column layouts and other typesetting features without involving complex software stacks. > For those who need the extra precision: use it. This is not an argument against tools like Microsoft Word or LaTeX; this is a wake up call, that most of us don't need them. > But then I hear: what about links? Images? I respond: URLs. Plain text supports URLs no problem. And here's an excerpt from Len's thoughts about Gemini. => http://len.falken.ink/web/perceived-relations-between-gopher-gemini-and-http.txt > The system I host this blog on uses a subset of HTTP / HTML so simple that it basically mimics exactly what Gopher does: the main page is a directory listing done with RSS / Atom, and each entry is something to download. I've opted to stick to plain text for most of my content, but if I wanted to, I could serve svgs or pdfs or anything. This means the entire system just boils down to HTTP GET, some basic XML, and nothing else. It's as simple as Gemini without being Gemini, and structured as Gopher without being Gopher. Based upon that last sentence, it's unnecessary to use anything but the smallest web browsers, such as Lynx and Links2, or something like Kristall. The problem is, I only know of one text-based (text/plain) website: len.falken.ink, but Gopher and Gemini sites are text-based by design. This makes the Kristall internet browser the best browser for reading documents on the Small Internet. Many other personal websites are "text-based," but the sites use basic HTML. My sawv.org website is mostly focused on text. The danluu.com personal website contains a lot of text with some images, and I can read it well within Kristall. Instead of embedding images within webpages, Len's idea of displaying raw URLs to images, like on Gemini, makes it easier to read SmallWeb sites within Kristall, Castor, and Lagrange. When viewing a webpage (HTML) within Kristall that contains embedded images, Kristall displays little icons where the images would be embedded. Unfortunately, Kristall does not provide the option to view the images via clicking. If Kristall displayed the links contained within the image-source tags, then it would be possible to view the images. This is the best-designed media website in the U.S. => https://text.npr.org Since that website uses clean, simple, and lightweight HTML markup, and since the article pages contain only text, then that site displays fine within Kristall. My website displays fine within Kristall. Actually, many sites work fine within Kristall, at least the ones that interest me for READING. In my lengthy SmallWeb post ... => https://sawv.org/smallweb ... I considered the best browsing client to be Chrome with the Markdown Preview Plus browser extension. It uses typography options that I set within the MPP extension to display text/plain websites that are marked up with Gemtext or Markdown, and the extension applies the same typography prefs when viewing raw text websites that contain no markup, such as Len's site. But except for my test website, I don't know of any Markdown-only websites. Rather than catering to the SmallWeb, I think that it's better to cater to the document-based sites that exist on the web, Gopher, and Gemini. The web versions, however, would need to be lightweight websites. Advanced, graphical Gemini browsers, such as Kristall, Castor, and Lagrange are good starting points for creating internet browsers that provide users with even more control over the content that gets accessed. Kristall will render Markdown files, served over the web, provided that the MIME type returned by the web server is text/markdown, which is highly unlikely. Most of the plain text files are served over the web as text/plain. Internet browsers should let users choose which file extensions to render, according to their typography prefs, regardless of what protocol is used to access the files and regardless of the MIME type returned. For my screenshots listed below, I stored the images at Flickr. This time, I'll link to the images, instead of embedding them. I'm using the Kristall internet browser in these screenshots. => https://sawv.org/2020/09/28/my-typography-settings-for-the-kristall-internet-browser.html At my Gemini site ... => gemini://sawv.org ... I can view web feeds in my simple feed-reading app. I have a cron job that runs every few hours that reads the RSS and Atom feed files, and my app creates new feed pages for each site that I'm monitoring. This image shows a partial list of the sites that I have "subscribed" to via feeds. => https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51000371736_de6abc6e93.jpg When I click one of those links, I see a formatted display of what exists within the RSS and Atom files. Here's the output of my feed app for Len's RSS feed. => https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51000375481_d4ab33d068.jpg When I click a link, I'm taken to his website. This is how text/plain content served over the web, Gemini, and Gopher displays within Kristall, according to my typography prefs. => https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50999674473_645d605693.jpg Some websites place all of their article content within their feeds. Axios does this. I can read Axios content on Gemini within Kristall. This is a screenshot of how my feed-reading app displays the contents of the Axios feed file. => https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50999671278_d69647713b.jpg Axios's webpages, however, work fine within Kristall, and this is especially nice, since most of Axios's content is text-based. When viewing the axios.com webpages within Kristall and Links2, I have to scroll down about 2/3 to 3/4 of the page to get to the actual article. axios.com places an enormous amount of cruft at the top of their article pages. Many document-based, for-profit websites do this. But at least the pages are readable. Even politico.com web articles display fine within Kristall. This screenshot shows the homepage of the text.npr.org website. => https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/50999675763_4394172f77.jpg Here's a web article hosted at text.npr.org being viewed within Kristall. => https://live.staticflickr.com/65535/51000360061_ae5d3762a1.jpg Kristall might have a slight bug, regarding typography and rendering pages over different protocols. Web pages look the same as the Gemini pages, regarding colors, but for some reason, the font sizes are larger for web pages. In my SmallWeb post, I defined the SmallWeb as using text/plain with no HTML. The following links would be examples of SmallWeb sites and pages, according to my definition. => http://len.falken.ink => http://len.falken.ink/philosophy/is-privacy-in-all-our-interests.txt => http://md.soupmode.com/home.md => http://md.soupmode.com/2017/12/02/notessat-dec-2-2017.md => https://sawv.org/home.txt => https://sawv.org/2021/02/28/crochet-snug-cowl.txt Others might consider websites, such as danluu.com, text.npr.org, and themarkup.org to be SmallWeb-ish. With Kristall, I can view text content that exists on simply-designed websites, and I can read content that exists on Gopher and Gemini. No need for another browser. The SmallWeb does not have a specification. Varying degrees of a lightweight web exist. And with the way that I define the SmallWeb or the Small Internet, I'm focusing heavily on text and ignoring those who are more visually-leaning and enjoy graphic art. This is a currently updated personal website of an IndieWeb.org supporter. => https://www.kickscondor.com That cool-looking website might remind some of us old-timers of the quirky and funky personal websites from the 1990s. The site, however, makes use of advanced aspects of CSS and JavaScript, I think. It's visually fascinating, but it would not work well with my SmallWeb/Small Internet thinking. And that's why some personal site authors would never agree to a web subset idea because it would eliminate the aspects of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that they use on their own websites. For websites like kickscondor.com, I would view them within a so-called modern web browser. But for most of my internet reading, I will use browsers, such as Kristall and Links2 or Pale Moon with the uMatrix cloned extension cranked up. I see no need for a subset of the web. Website owners can manage their sites however they desire, which is one important reason why many people like maintaining their own personal sites. Nobody gets to dictate to them how their sites should function. With Gemini, all sites look the same. On the web, sites vary between looking like Len's and Kicks Condor, and that's a reason why the web is so beloved. While I admire the funky, quirky, and fascinating designs of some personal websites, I'm focused on the content, mainly text but images too. I think that enhancing Kristall a bit more is a much wiser choice than attempting a web subset. Gemini was created because it was easier to create a new application layer protocol with new clients and servers than attempt some kind of web subset that would probably have little to no consensus on what defines a web subset. solderpunk launched Project Gemini in June 2019. Excerpts from his June 2020 post about a web subset. => gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/gemlog/why-not-just-use-a-subset-of-http-and-html.gmi > To my mind, the problem with deciding upon a strictly limited subset of HTTP and HTML and slapping a label on it (let's say "SafeWeb") and calling it a day is that it would do almost nothing to create a clearly demarcated space where people can go to consume *only* that kind of content in *only* that kind of way, which is what I think we really want. There's simply no way to know in advance whether fetching any given https:// URL will yield SafeWeb content or UnsafeWeb content. The Links2 web browser helps and so does Kristall. More from solderpunk's post: > Now, there's nothing stopping people from writing their own web browsers which refuse to implement any particular piece of HTTP or HTML which they disagree with, yielding a guaranteed SafeWeb experience (although such an undertaking would be an order of magnitude more work than writing a fully featured Gemini client). Supposing you had such a browser, what would you do with it? The overwhelming majority of websites would not render correctly on it. I can READ a surprisingly large number of websites within Links2 and Kristall. Links2, however, can display embedded images if the browser user desires. > All of this is an *insane* quantity of tedious and error-prone work in order to do a bad job of replicating what simple-by-design protocols like Gopher or Gemini offer at a drastically reduced cost of entry: a clearly defined online space, distinct from the web, where you know for sure and in advance that everybody is playing by the same rules. And that's why I'm glad that Gemini exists. It's an option. We can CHOOSE to use Gemini or ignore it. That's cool. Win-win for all. I like Gemini's obvious separation from the web and Gopher. And I think that Kristall is the only GUI-based browser than can access all three protocols. Kristall offers a pared down view of the web. It would probably be unacceptable for most people, but I like it. Excerpts from: => http://blog.danieljanus.pl/2019/10/07/web-of-documents/ > These days, the WWW is mostly a Web of Applications. An application is a broader concept: it can display text or images, but also lets you interact not just with itself, but with the world at large. And that's all well and good, as long as you consciously intend these interactions to happen. > I think we can base the new Web of Documents on ol' trusty HTTP (or, better, HTTPS), HTML and CSS as we know them today, with just three restraints: > No methods other than GET. > No scripts of any kind. > No cookies. The Kristall internet browser meets those requirements on the client side, and that's mainly because of Kristall's roots with Gemini. But Kristall supports little to no CSS. It might support some inline CSS. I used Kristall to read and excerpt Daniel's "Web of Documents" post. Big, bloated, virtual machine, modern web browsers don't support Gopher, which is about as old as the web. Micro web, tiny web, small web, lightweight web, bloated web, quirky web, application web, and on and on are all supported by today's web. Nothing new needs to be created. People can use the web however they desire. But for a different experience, a relatively small number of people will also use Gopher and/or Gemini, and nobody on the web will be harmed by this niche activity. -30- ``` dir : 2021/03/03 ```