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[SPEC-CHANGE] Small housekeeping updates

solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG

Sat May 23 11:26:51 BST 2020

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Ahoy!

I pushed some small changes to the Gemini specification this morning,which you can see at:

These are fairly small, house-keeping style changes being made inadvance of the formal "unfreezing" of the spec come June. Mostserver/client implementations should need only minor changes if any tokeep up with these, but authors, please do check/test rather thanassuming!

SUMMARY OF CHANGES:

Response headers now must use only a single space character to separatethe <META> content from the status code, instead of a mix of one-or-morespaces and tabs (see section 1.3.1). This means the maximum size of avalid response header is now 1029 bytes (including the CRLF), whereasbefore it was unbounded.

It is now specified that content with a text/* media type may betransferred via Gemini using bare LF line separators as well as thecanonical CRLF (see section 1.3.3).

Use of the Server Name Indication (SNI) extension to TLS is nowmandatory (see section 1.4)

IMPLICATIONS FOR SERVER AUTHORS:

If your server is using a tab character to separate status codes from<META> content, you MUST switch to using a space.

IMPLICATIONS FOR CLIENT AUTHORS:

Client authors of a Postelian inclination probably don't need to changeanything in response to the change of response headers. If you reallywant to you MAY refuse to parse headers using non-compliant whitespace,but this will probably just require adding ugly code for littlebenefit.

Check that your client can handle text/gemini content withCRLF-separated lines without visibly displaying the CR. If you areusing built-in line splitting tools from your programming languagesstandard library, chances are very good you are already fine in thisregard.

If your client is not using SNI, you MUST start using it.

IMPLICATIONS FOR CONTENT AUTHORS:

If you author your Gemini content on a pre-OS X Apple computer, '70s or'80s vintage 8-bit microcomputer or MIT LISP machine, you should takecare to convert your line endings to CR or CRLF before uploading it toyour server of choice, or write your own server which does theconversion before you. Please let the list know more about your amazinglife decisions!

Cheers,Solderpunk