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Three month spec freeze

colecmac at protonmail.com colecmac at protonmail.com

Tue Jun 2 21:10:47 BST 2020

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I am in favour of 1, but not 2 or 3.

Regarding 1:Is there a valid usecase for serving non UTF-8 content? It is unlikely to be supportedand should just be converted. But on the other hand, I don't feel like it's a huge issueif it's allowed. And `charset` is a part of the MIME media type anyway, so it's alwaysvalid.

Regarding 2:I think that preformatted text lines are very important for renderingpurposes and I would be sad to see them go. I don't feel strongly about listlines, but now that they're here it seems good to keep them.

Regarding 3:Solderpunk has already indicated that this would be nice, but not all language librariessupport it. I'd rather have TLS 1.2 still supported, so that all existing (and future)clients and servers can work.

makeworld

‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐On Tuesday, June 2, 2020 3:57 PM, Petite Abeille <petite.abeille at gmail.com> wrote:

On Jun 2, 2020, at 21:26, solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> wrote:

As of yesterday, the freeze is over! The spec is now "liquid" once again.

Cool. Can we remove things? :)

❶ drop ;charset= from text/gemini content-type response. Everything is UTF-8. Gemini doesn't support legacy encodings.

Rational: Clients shouldn't burden themselves with legacy charset conversions, which is finicky. Servers are better placed to normalize encoding if they must. Gemini is about the future, not the past (EBCDIC 273 anyone?).

❷ drop everything from text/gemini but text and link lines.

Rational: The world has enough formatting options as it is. Everybody and their pet fish has their preferences (most posts on this list are about formatting...). text/gemini will not move the state of the art. Keep it simple. Less is more.

❸ mandate

= TLS 1.3. Drop legacy support.

Rational: no point dragging the burden of the past into the future. Gemini innovative take on TLS deserves a modern foundation.

In short, Mercury over TLS [1] :)

Networking Truths #12 [2]:

In protocol design, perfection has been reached not when thereis nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

This would make Saint-Exupéry proud.

[1] https://portal.mozz.us/gemini/gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/cornedbeef/the-mercury-protocol.gmi

[2] https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1925