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solderpunk solderpunk at SDF.ORG

Fri May 29 16:45:17 BST 2020

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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 mostpowerful/inclusive interpretation of a spec tends to become the onlyacceptable implementation over a long enough timeline. Everybody buildstheir content for that interpretation, and more conservative clientscome to be considered "broken". It's like trying to surf the modern webwith cookies and JS turned off: nothing works. The only hope is todesign specs where the most powerful interpretation is within acceptablelimits. Which seems to me to be impossible in a world where URLs can beharmless pointers to network resources *or* arbitrarily large chunks ofdata of arbitrary but unamiguous type.

In that crazy world, our only hope is a strong cultural norm of "No,don't do that!". It's true that maybe that will work better for Geminithan it did for the web, because, you know, the web is actually therealongside Gemini and people who really want the worst of the web willjust stick with it and leave us alone.

But I really didn't want to just rely on politely asking people not todo certain things, but to make it impossible or very difficult to dothem at the protocol level. I know you can never *really* do that,people can ignore RFCs and implement totally broken stuff and theinternet police don't come and arrest them. But I had hoped we couldget really close to that ideal.

Cheers,Solderpunk