We all know how awful most modern websites are in terms of bloat, javascript and tracking. Not only that, but designing and maintaining web-browsers has become such a gigantic undertaking (almost the size of an operating system), that only a few companies have the resources to do it (google and mozilla, and mozilla might not hold on for much longer).
These alternative protocols offer a minimal set of features, and are trying to get back to what the web should’ve been: static content with images, text, and links, with local applications filling the void for anything more complicated than that.
Lets say I wanted a privacy-friendly way to view a page on a news site. I could:
- Copy the URL of the page
- Open some tool, (or website, anything), paste that url.
- It converts the content in the url to the necessary privacy-friendly alternative format, and I can view it with my gopher/gemini browser (or even maybe a markdown viewer).
I know there are a few html -> markdown converters that can do the last step.
Does anyone know if this would work?
The simple answer is yes.
It’s possible to encode or tunnel anything over any protocol.
The next question is why isn’t it done more?
- http has basically become the defacto internet protocol for all media content. This has resulted in a lot of other protocols from becoming blocked due lack of support or due to firewall rules.
- efficiency. http (and all the other protocols it runs atop) have become highly optimized for doing what it does. To layer something like http over another protocol, would certainly be possible but it would likely be slower, less responsive and lack a lot of the niceties that make http work as well as it does.
For the above reasons it’s actually more common to see other protocols run on top of http. This is especially common to prevent blocking and censorship by making the traffic look like normal http traffic when it may actually be private messaging apps, file transfers, VPN, etc.
