Solderpunk recently started second guessing some gemini things over on cornedbeef:

=> gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space:1965/~solderpunk/cornedbeef/the-mercury-protocol.gmi cornedbeef - the mercury protocol

In short, I hate it and hope you don't do it.

Why?

* confusion toward the great momentum of gemini
* we already have gopher and mercury doesn't do enough "new" to be worth it
* formatting lines is important (see 10,000 mailing list posts for reasons why)
* preformatting lines don't actually allow for extensibility if you just define the alt text thing in the spec
* TLS is annoying and a barrier to server & client writing, but it's also one of the things that has attracted a lot of positive attention
* "lang" is going to be essential

Honestly, the only thing in the Mercury spec that I think is a good idea is just biting the bullet and saying UTF-8 is manditory for text/gemini. I don't see a downside there. So, uh... do that! And we shall never speak of this Mercury thing ever again, okay?


Originally Published 2020-05-27 at:
gemini://tilde.team/~tomasino/journal/20200527-mercury-hells-no.gmi

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