The WWW is seriously broken
Saying this on a Gemini log may look ridiculous and perhaps a bit biased, but it is true nevertheless.
It happens that I am trying to run a business, and as a business I must do all the stuff a business does:
- Have a nice (mine is barely decent) website;
- do a lot of marketing, etc…
- You grasped the idea! 👌
I am actually doing all of this by myself thanks to AI (this is another story), but the more I have been digging into this task the more I have been noticing something off, and I'll tell you what.
Brands want to be unique!
Branding is good. Branding is bad. Perhaps today I am a bit crazy, but as a designer, branding is good; it allows you to unleash your creativity and lets you feel as if you were a genius. On the other hand, branding is strict and the communication is very restrictive. Under this perspective, it is clear why, even in the digital era, there are always more pressures to deal with devices and operating systems presented as appliances rather than customizable tools. Even in the open-source space, branding is becoming pervasive; a famous example was this campaign "please don't theme our apps":
Please don't theme our apps
I can understand the reason: a brand's success is also built on recognition and awareness; for that reason, brands are extremely careful about being represented consistently and properly.
The branding obsession made WWW useless
Branding and its visual identity are built on specific rules that only work when respected but that can be easily broken when you ignore or disregard them. This can easily happen involuntarily on any medium that allows you to modify it.
Life is good when you can do your stuff the way you like. When you can't is less good, therefore branding is bad.
This is why MacOS is bad and Linux/BSD is good. Chrome is bad while Firefox is good, for instance! And guess what happens when you use Linux/BSD plus Firefox?
WWW made Brands falling apart
I have been looking for prospects online, visiting local business websites (I do B2B), and I had a very hard time properly rendering these hundreds of websites I was visiting daily, including mine. I was awfully amazed by such an amount of crap until I started to realize what was going on! HOLY CRAP!!! 💩
Because I am definitely an old man, I abandoned small fonts forever. My XFCE4 fonts are big, my Firefox fonts are set to 120%, and by changing the size of the browser and system fonts I completely broke 99% of the websites (including mine).
That is totally ridiculous: changing the size of the fonts shouldn't break a web page, but it does, 100%. HOLY CRAP!!! 💩
HTML5 was built for Brands and DRM
BRANDRM (I've just invented it) is the worst thing that could happen to the WWW, and even though I have a brand, I can't ignore the fact that modern branding is bad, very bad. Modern branding has been developed as another limitation to our lives and this sucks.
Despite all the branding effort, browsers that still have in their roots (including Firefox) a different idea of the web can easily break the BRANDRM! Therefore all the talk about responsiveness and fluid layouts is essentially bullshit if a website can't resist a few font size point increases. They, the most aggressive Brands and commercial OS, can't enforce branding rules because, at the core, WWW is built on open standards, but if they could they would not allow you to even change the font resolution of your operating system.
But what does Gemini have to do with BRANDRM?
Gemini has, by nature, a really sane approach to text and content, and therefore Gemini clients do not break text flow. Gemini's line approach is perhaps one of the smartest intuitions SolderPunk had. Someone might believe that text-only content naturally flows properly everywhere, and guess what? This is not even remotely true. I had direct experience with commercial and non-commercial ebooks getting broken when I started to make the font size on my e-reader bigger. Sad but true.
With Gemini and all its gorgeous clients, whether TUI or GUI, text is not going to break regardless of the font size or the viewport dimension. This is good and this is how it should work. PERIOD.
Wrapping this up
As long as your OS, device, or client lets you change font sizes you will break the WWW. HTML5 has been relentlessly improved to make layouts more fluid and smarter, but apparently the implementation behind it was extremely short-sighted: even a small change of a few font size points can make any page quite unusable!
Someone may argue that websites are built like crap and this might be 95% true, but eventually what matters is the end user's experience, and this is already broken and lost forever, starting from the fact that each browser engine does the job of rendering pages in its own way. 15 years later the issue has gotten worse.
For comments or suggestion write me at:
freezr AT disroot DOT org
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