On Sun Aug 9, 2020 at 7:55 PM CEST, Jason McBrayer wrote: > colecmac at protonmail.com writes: > > > I have to wonder whether anyone would actually use this. What do you > > all think of this workflow/feature? Is it potentially useful? > > I do think a caching proxy would be potentially useful, especially as > few clients do caching themselves. I could also see it useful for > offline use (client spiders through local proxy while online, client > reads > offline through local proxy). > > The tricky bit is, of course, cache expiration. We don't provide as much > useful information to the cache as http does. You'll need to use > heuristics not only for how long to cache, but to provide a way to force > a refresh, which isn't covered in the spec. If nothing else, I think there's a small, useful role for a very simple caching proxy which just maintains an in-memory cache of everything visited which is valid for, say, five minutes. The reason this is useful is that navigating Gemini capsules often involves extensive use of the "back button" (and, at least for me on AV-98, the "up" command, which gets you from example.com/foo/bar/baz to to example.com/foo/bar/ even in the lack of an explicit link, and the "root" command, which gets you from example.com/foo/bar/baz to to example.com), which often entails loading the same page repeatedly in a relatively short window of time. A very simple dumb local cache would cut down on transactions for this. For people like me who often read something in Gemini/Gopherspace, then want to reference a few days later but cannot remember where they read it, a proxy which maintained full-text search of everything visited in the past month or so would be *super* handy, but I have no idea how to build such a thing. I'm kind of attracted to the idea of small, simple, do-one-thing-well proxies which can be chained together like "filter" programs in a pipeline...but I guess the TLS overhead would stack up quickly, encouraging a kind of highly configurable "Swiss army knife" proxy instead. Not as pretty, but potentially very useful... Cheers, Solderpunk
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