# Quote - May 7, 2021 - About Gemini's Beginnings

Today, I stumbled upon this post, made back in February.

"gemini isn't meant to do everything"
=> gemini://nytpu.com/gemlog/2021-02-14.gmi

Excerpts from the post with my edits contained within brackets:

> Despite the marketing of Gemini as:

> "You may think of Gemini as "the web, stripped right back to its essence" or as "Gopher, souped up and modernised a little", depending upon your perspective."

> If you know about Gemini's early development then you know that Gemini evolved from /Gopher/, not from HTTP!

> Gemini is not meant to be used for everything, it's meant to be a cleaner and more modern way to deliver text content [compared to Gopher], while allowing linking to other resources.  

> Thanks to the wonder of URIs, you can link to any other source you want on any protocol!  Everyone seems to approach Gemini from the "stripped down" web perspective, but they miss out on all the ideology that comes behind Gophers and Gemini's founders (who are Gophers, and therefore adopted those ideas).

Yeah, I believe that it was a mistake in Gemini's beginnings to compare Gemini to the web. The only comparison should be to Gopher, or Gemini should simply be viewed on its own merit and not compared to anything.

More from the post:

> Now, just because I'm addressing misconceptions with Gemini, it's amazing how many people don't bother to read the FAQ despite the fact that that's almost always what's linked when it's submitted some place.  

> "Why doesn't it have inline images" they ask while ignoring the very clear statement saying that the user should always know when a request is being made. [Bingo!] They also don't bother to look at one of the most popular Gemini clients, Lagrange, which has the ability to display media inline (upon clicking a link, not automatically). 

>  I too believe that having to navigate to a new page to view media, then navigating back is an undesirable pattern [I disagree], but I believe that having dozens of unknowable web requests on page load is not desirable either [I agree].  

> The second biggest complaint is that you [authors/publishers] can't control the styling of the site, but that almost invariably comes from web devs and I wouldn't expect them to understand why the user [readers] should have control any more than I would expect salmonella to understand why humans cook food before eating it.

That last paragraph was great. Gemini should never implement the ideas of modern web design proponents.

Gemini needs to be left alone as it exists in May 2021, nearly two years after being created. People who disagree can create their own application layer protocols or stick with that web thing, which might catch on someday.

=> /  home

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