none of these faults resonate with me. gemini feels like an http html lite, that exposes what is. that the author of this post wants more us fine. but we have html already for that. the idea of making visible making explicit the content, of not making it rich: it's simply andifferent philosophy than what this author seems to be seeking.
I tried to get into Gemini. I wrote a server in Elixir. Then I started to write content. The lack of inline links is a brutal and I'm pretty sure it'll keep Gemini from growing beyond anything but a curiosity.
Personally, I could never use a platform that didn't support inline links[1]. Simply unthinkable! How could you possibly indicate which part of the text a link was related to?
HN’s lack of inline links is one of its worst features, and comments with large numbers of links are unbearable. Fortunately, longform HN comments are rare. Gemini also sounds more limited than even HN comments, because here you can put a URL like http://example.com inline and it works fine, you just can’t replace the URL with a custom label. In Gemini, it’s more literal than that - a link must be on its own line, not in the middle of a paragraph.
I've noticed that at least in the client I use (amfora) URI are not treated any differently from text and the client can insert a line break in the middle of them, making selecting the URI to paste it elsewhere hard.
This is not the client's fault btw, it's part of the spec. Anything not preceded by the magic characters '=>', '#', '`' or '>' is just treated literally.
The article does mention this a bit, and (after reading quite a bit of Gemini content) I agree:
'The links are awkwardly placed, and the "placeholder" markers
(such as numbers or brackets) to connect the text to the link below
has not gelled to a standard.'
It's like hashtags in tweets - it'll eventually become some kind of community ad-hoc standard, that will be inferior to simple inline links. I guess it makes things harder to parse, so understand why they did it - but inline links is HTML's killer feature. The rest is fluff!