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daniel:// stenberg://

The #Gemini protocol seen by this #HTTP client person daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/05/28 -

tldr: I think they have some improvements left to do.
28 May 2023 at 14:21 | Open on mastodon.social
7 comments
nytpu

@bagder
> Its quite similar to going back to GOPHER.
It should be noted that Gemini was literally intended as “Gopher but with TLS and more palatable markup” rather than anything related to modern HTTP.

However your other points not related to the markup/visual style are perfectly accurate IMHO

28 May 2023 at 14:28 | Open on tilde.zone
nytpu

@bagder Hmm, and regarding the UTF-8 URLs, IIRC there was a big debate in the mailing list about whether or not clients should punycode IDNs, or transcode them to a different encoding, or just verbatim pass all URLs; and Solderpunk decided to just UTF-8 encode all URLs over the wire which is IMO not any better and possibly worse. Introduces lots of complexity: should clients normalize the Unicode (IME more complex and difficult than punycoding), and if so with what strategy? Should you still percent-encode the path or can you now leave that unencoded too? Lots of issues.

@bagder Hmm, and regarding the UTF-8 URLs, IIRC there was a big debate in the mailing list about whether or not clients should punycode IDNs, or transcode them to a different encoding, or just verbatim pass all URLs; and Solderpunk decided to just UTF-8 encode all URLs over the wire which is IMO not any better and possibly worse. Introduces lots of complexity: should clients normalize the Unicode (IME more complex and difficult than punycoding), and if so with what strategy? Should you still percent-encode...

28 May 2023 at 14:51 | Open on tilde.zone
daniel:// stenberg://

@nytpu yeah, it seems totally crazy to me and seriously under-documented what exactly it means

28 May 2023 at 14:55 | Open on mastodon.social
tomasino

@bagder @nytpu agreed. that was one of the most frustrating bikeshedding decisions. Nobody chiming in really understood the complexity of the URI spec or the implications of what they were proposing, and it went totally against the other goals of the project.

Using TLS, for instance, was chosen because library support was so common and accessible it lowered the barrier to server and client creation. Tweaking URL parsing made things harder without any tangible benefit.

I hope that gets scrapped, personally. And yes, carving the spec into 2 (protocol and document format) has been discussed already and piloted. It just hasn't made its way back to the official living document. That would help as well.

Where I think we'll probably see more pushback is on TOFU (I fully support DANE, but DNSSEC is still such a barrier), and chunking. There's a major philosophy of 1-request-per-document which seems antithetical to chunking.

Regardless, all 100% valid criticism and from one of the most reputable sources. I'm sure the whole community will be discussing this for weeks to come. Cheers!

@bagder @nytpu agreed. that was one of the most frustrating bikeshedding decisions. Nobody chiming in really understood the complexity of the URI spec or the implications of what they were proposing, and it went totally against the other goals of the project.

Using TLS, for instance, was chosen because library support was so common and accessible it lowered the barrier to server and client creation. Tweaking URL parsing made things harder without any tangible benefit.

28 May 2023 at 15:01 | Open on tilde.zone
daniel:// stenberg://

@tomasino @nytpu in fact, using plain old CA is the *least* complex and most established system and way more secure than TOFU...

Thanks for the comment. I fully understand that my views and opinions may not align very well with many of the people in and fans of the Gemini project.

28 May 2023 at 15:06 | Open on mastodon.social
tomasino

@bagder glad to see your thoughts on the subject

28 May 2023 at 14:28 | Open on tilde.zone
Slatian

@bagder Considering that gemini started out as a though experiment on a phlog that someone else implemented …

Thanks for having a look at the protocol! (I invested quite a bit of time to develop one of the first graphical gemini browsers)

That being said: There is a gemini specification that was being worked on over at https://gitlab.com/gemini-specification but it looks pretty dead now.

There also is one giant flaw in gemtext: While easy to write and parse isn’t great for expressing semantics and encourages abusing unicode and ACII-Art for conveying Information, making it … not very useful beyond the content it was intended for.

Some content feels a bit like marking something as a red font color in an Office document and expecting everyone to be able to see and interpret that part as important, just in the complete opposite direction when it comes to the technology being used.

It is fun though! But it will never scale (having read the original phlogpost when it was new: Mission kind of accomplished, I guess).

@bagder Considering that gemini started out as a though experiment on a phlog that someone else implemented …

Thanks for having a look at the protocol! (I invested quite a bit of time to develop one of the first graphical gemini browsers)

That being said: There is a gemini specification that was being worked on over at https://gitlab.com/gemini-specification but it looks pretty dead now.

28 May 2023 at 15:06 | Open on fedi.absturztau.be
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