alt Hacker NewsNot quite. I think Gemini has deliberately gone for a "text only" philosophy, which I think is very constraining.
The early web had a lot going on and allowed for a lot of creative experimentation which really caught the eye and the imagination.
Gemini seems designed to only allow long-form text content. You can't even have a table let alone inline images which makes it very limited for even dry scientific research papers, which I think would otherwise be an excellent use-case for Gemini. But it seems that this sort of thing is a deliberate design/philosophical decision by the authors which is a shame. They could have supported full markdown, but they chose not to (ostensibly to ease client implementation but there are a squillion markdown libraries so that assertion doesn't hold water for me)
It's their protocol so they can do what they want with it, but it's why I think Gemini as a protocol is a dead-end unless all you want to do is write essays (with no images or tables or inline links or table-of-contents or MathML or SVG diagrams or anything else you can think of in markdown). Its a shame as I think the client-cert stuff for Auth is interesting.
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There are images in geminispace, and audio, and (probably) video. It's just not inline. One of constraints of the protocol is that pages cannot load content without your express say-so.
It’s tough but one of the tenets of Gemini is that a lone programmer can write their own client in a spirited afternoon/weekend. Markdown is just a little too hard to clear the bar. Already there was much bellyaching on the mailing list about forcing dependence on SSL libraries; suggesting people rely on more libraries would have been a non-starter
Note that the Gemini protocol is just a way of moving bytes around; nothing stops you from sending Markdown if you want (and at least some clients will render it - same with inline images).