💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 001186.gmi captured on 2020-09-24 at 02:03:45. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
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Sean Conner sean at conman.org
Fri May 29 22:15:04 BST 2020
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It was thus said that the Great solderpunk once stated:
On Fri, May 29, 2020 at 03:10:30PM +0000, colecmac at protonmail.com wrote:
I think we need to rule out the equivalent of
All existing clients rule this out, I don't see the issue. As long as
clients continue not to execute arbitrary Javascript, it should be fine.
The issue is that the history of the web demonstrates that the most
powerful/inclusive interpretation of a spec tends to become the only
acceptable implementation over a long enough timeline. Everybody builds
their content for that interpretation, and more conservative clients
come to be considered "broken". It's like trying to surf the modern web
with cookies and JS turned off: nothing works.
The only hope is to
design specs where the most powerful interpretation is within acceptable
limits. Which seems to me to be impossible in a world where URLs can be
harmless pointers to network resources *or* arbitrarily large chunks of
data of arbitrary but unamiguous type.
I added the test for data: URIs for the lulz (it is, after all, a *clienttorture* test), which the expectation that no one would really do anythingwith it. And the data itself is 'text/gamini' as a nice treat for anyonethat did anything with it.
One way to think of data: is not to inline data, but as a pre-fetch ofdata, but without the overhead of a second request. Yes, it's silly, but itis what it is. Besides, as just a gut feeling, I think the majority (wellover 99%) of the links you'll find in the Geminisphere are:
gemini: gopher: https: http: mailto:
I have no numbers to back that up, but that feels right to me, and suchlinks as tel: or sip: will almost *never* show up (for the record, I haven'tcome across tel: or sip: on the web in the wild [1]).
But I really didn't want to just rely on politely asking people not to
do certain things, but to make it impossible or very difficult to do
them at the protocol level. I know you can never *really* do that,
people can ignore RFCs and implement totally broken stuff and the
internet police don't come and arrest them. But I had hoped we could
get really close to that ideal.
Creativity is amplified by restrictions, and oh boy is Gemini restrictive. So it's not surprising to me that people are poking and proding at the edgesto see what's possible. I never realized that music consisting of the samenote was a thing until this video:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eSuK_5zW2iM
or how about the restriction of using a single color for a painting?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u-pdyTFOvYw
Years ago, a friend sent me an email of only 26 words. It was a coherentmessage *where every word was in alphabetical order!* I replied withanother 26 words, with a coherent message, but in *reverse alphabeticalorder!*
I mention these as a way to explain the recent activity in Gemini, as morepeoples' creativity has been unleashed by the contraints of Gemini.
And always keep in mind, a polite "no" is always a viable answer.
-spc
[1] I do at work, but at work I deal with SIP, so tel: and sip: comes with that territory.