💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 001504.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 01:50:28. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Luke Emmet luke at marmaladefoo.com
Wed Jun 10 20:20:04 BST 2020
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
On 10-Jun-2020 14:49, Matthew Graybosch wrote:
I agree that it's important to let people using Gemini clients know how
big a file they're about to download is, and I think the status codes
for indicating large, huge, and colossal files are a good idea.
This inspired me to manually add file sizes to my link descriptions for
any file I host on my own capsules as a courtesy to visitors so that
people can decide for themselves whether they want to open a particular
link. I've done the same for my capsules' atom feeds so that people
visiting CAPCOM can also see how large my files are.
I won't presume to recommend that everybody do this, even though it
would be nice to see my approach become a convention. It takes time to
go through your directory tree and get file sizes even if you're just
using shell commands like "ls -hal", but it's a low-tech approach I can
implement today instead of waiting for client and server developers to
catch up.
Again, the client can do a lot of work for you in this regard. As we all know mostly the heavy content is going to be images and things like linked mp3, zip, pdf etc.
Generally speaking a client can examine the URL and make an educated assumption about the target mime type from the file extension. Such links can be decorated or hinted to the user who may or may not decide to download them.
In the upcoming relese of GemiNaut I have implemented a simple decoration scheme that lets users infer this form the link. This decoration is added by the client irrespective of the server.
=
/normal/path Normal gemini link
These can generally can be assumed to be text/gmi or maybe text/*, no extra decoration, so displayed like this:
⇒ Normal gemini link
=
/path/to/file.png Link to an image
these can be decorated to hint this to the user, so what you actually see is this. The icon hints at the content you will likely get.
⇒ 💠Link to an image
Do I want to click on all links to images? Probably not for various reasons including bandwidth/performance, and the client helped me make that judgement.
At the moment I have an opt in list of the most likely file types that might be linked to:
[png gif jpg etc] are images
[mp3 mov pdf zip gz] are decorated as "binary" files
This gives the user a good idea what they will get and helps make a choice to click on the link or not
Best wishes
- Luke