++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
+ Launching Gutenborg
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
| Yay! Finally I'm phlogging again! I've been almost two whole years
| in complete silence.
| 
|
|
| Man... so much changed...
| 
|
|
| But, above all, I've been working on two very neat projects: Blipt!
| and Gutenborg.
| 
|
| Blipt! initially was called "blepete", coming from the Greek word
| for "see". Nice thing I changed that.
| And my initial idea was to release a tool called "videte", coming
| from the Latin word for "see". So, while Blepete was intended as
| a generic GUI constructor, Videte should be able to run users scripts
| and provide useful tool to build protocols handlers, like a tool
| to create Gopher of Gemini of Web clients.
| 
|
| All this because, at the time, I intended to use Lua as the scripting
| language. Lua is a very, very nice and simple and clean language and
| I admit I hadn't realized how interesting it was until very recently.
| But Tcl also is very pleasant to work with and once you get the grasp
| of it, it's very productive, too.
| 
|
| Gutenborg has become my favorite Gopher client. Actually this was the
| condition for releasing the software: first, I should be creating a
| tool for myself, and only if it was proved worthy, then I would
| release it to the world.
| 
|
| 
| But Gutenborg is not yet another Gopher client. You see, at first I
| intended to write a Gopher client basically to find what Blipt!
| should provide in order to be useful, what kind of features it
| should have in order for anyone be able to write clients in general
| using it.
| 
|
| So I wrote "videte-gopher" (before I changed all the names) and, at
| the same time, was looking to some kind of alternative to the Web
| (like almost everyone around here). I like Gopher, but it's showing
| its age and is mostly text-only (the only viable way to show
| content is using fixed-width fonts), I really appreciate Gemini but
| dislike using HTTP as the underlying transport protocol and I find
| most TUI programs interesting (I've been recently using "lazydocker",
| for instance) but yet they lack something and I still believe most
| programmers rely on TUIs not because they really like it but only
| because the only alternatives are HTML or a full fledged GUI toolkit.
|
|
| And, some time along the way I thought: hey! We could use Gopher
| as the underlying protocol but deliver some richer content. Not
| as "HTML entries" but maybe as an alternative way to display menus
| (entry type "1").
| You see: we already have images and links, we just display them in
| a very specific way. And this very specific ways is not something
| sacred that cannot be changed, somehow.
| 
| 
| And so the Gutenborg Protocol was born.
| 
| 
| The name is based, obviously, on "Gutenberg" (recalling paper and
| press and printing) and "borg" (recalling technology, somehow). My
| vision for it is to achieve pages that are beautiful and pleasant,
| but without all the fuss with floating divs or crazy colors or
| animation or embeded databases and cookies.
| And without playing videos or music, it's very important to say.
| 
|
| The pages should recall literal pages made of paper, laid down in a
| mostly vertical space (I always think about it in a proportion
| narrower than 9:16), possibly containing pictures, photographs or
| graphics but, overall, still oriented to displaying most of the
| content as text.
| Because, you know, text can be beautiful. Text CAN be something
| pleasant to look at.
| 
|
| Gutenborg now supports inline imageas, horizontal rules, four
| levels of headers, variable-width fonts paragraphs, fixed-width
| fonts text (that's the default, so you can migrate from pure Gopher
| menu formatting to Gutenborg Protocol in your own pace), bold, italic
| and superscript - all over the good old Gopher protocol, being
| rendered in a beautiful manner on Gutenborg (the client) and still
| being rather nice to look on common Gopher clients.
| 
| 
| You can download it here:
| https://cleber.solutions/projects/gutenborg/
| https://cleber.solutions/projects/blipt/
| 
| (Yeap, I only had time to create the Web version. I'm going to
| publish a "GutenSite" briefly on that same domain.)