💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 001981.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 01:30:52. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Paper paper at tilde.institute
Sat Jun 27 20:37:46 BST 2020
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On Sat, Jun 27, 2020 at 08:57:14AM +0000, solderpunk wrote:
Gemini servers (and servers for any other protocol supporting relative
URLs, including HTTP) will use redirects to get clients to add a
trailing slash to a URL which maps to a directory on the server's
filesystem. Handling this redirect is often invisible to the client
user, with the result that what "looks and feels" like a single request
is actually two immediately consecutive requests. This makes latency
appear to be much worse than it actually is. Perhaps this underlies
some people's perceptions that Gemini has unacceptable latency.
This basic problem is unavoidable, but there are many small things
client and server authors can do to minimise how often it happens:
In general, the client can't add a missing trailing slash itself because
it never knows if a given URL maps to something file-like or something
directory-like. An interesting exception is the root of the server.
Molly Brown and Jetforce (but not GLV-1.12556) both seem to redirect
gemini.example.com to gemini.example.com/, making the loading of
"homepages" feel slower than it needs to. I'm pretty sure it should be
safe for clients to automatically append trailing slashes to URLs
without paths.
I have a script which checks for redirects on websites and reportsstatus codes. On web it is much smaller problem - the saved latency ismuch less. This way I can see dead links and links which could causeproblems - http redirects instead of https or normal redirects which can beoptimised. Maybe something similar could be done for gemini, so that contentauthors could check if their links are ok.
I don't like this idea, because content authors should focus on writingcontent, not on how the content looks or if they are writing it the"correct way". Linters for gemini code sound like a bad idea and a signthat something is wrong.
On the server side, server authors should take care when doing things
like automatically generating directory listings to put trailing slashes
in links to directories so that the redirect is not necessary.That's the best solution I think.
Paper