More text channels where a reader can maintain a consistent, custom reading experience feels like a better solution than a bunch of disparate-looking sites all with their own color schemes, custom fonts, and massive headers 1. I often use text-based web browsers like Lynx and WebbIE. I also tend to follow a lot of people who maintain very webring-esque sites, even moreso than mine. Gopher is, or was, depending on your outlook, an alternative protocol to HTTP.
Despite most of the information about Gopher on the web being historical retrospectives , enthusiasts of a similar mind to me are keeping the protocol alive 2. Gemini is a sort of modern take on Gopher. I do think it needs a bit of love, however, as curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg points out how lacking the implementation details are. Gemini is for a small web, one for weirdos like me. All of this only really matters for background context.
The point of this post, however, is to talk about a strange problem that happens with unstyled text-based content. I always just kind of assumed this was one of those annoyances that would never really be important enough to try to solve.
But I recently stumbled across a browser that solves this in a very clever way. GemiNaut 4 is an open-source Gemini and Gopher browser for Windows that uses an identicon-esque visual system to help distinguish sites. Identicons are visual representations of hash functions, typically used for a similar version of the same problem β making visually distinct icons for default users on a site. Creating a simple visual off of a hash function helps keep users looking distinct by default. But he knew there was more to it than this:.
I originally came up with this idea to be used as an easy means of visually distinguishing multiple units of information, anything that can be reduced to bits. IMHO, too much of the web what we read are textual or numeric information which are not easy to distinguish at a glance when they are jumbled up together. So I think adding visual identifiers will make the user experience much more enjoyable.
