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Question About Link Format

Ben benulo at systemli.org

Fri Jul 17 10:21:50 BST 2020

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Hello guys, I am not normally one to get involved in the Gemini spec. I got into a discussion with Martin about how UTF-8 characters are supposed to be handled in links in Gemini documents.

On my site I have a link in a document like this:

logarion/taĝikio--lando-montara.gmi Taĝikio: Lando Montara

This refers locally to the actual file name on the disk. The main question is, is this allowed in Gemini documents? I thought this should work because I believe that Gemini is UTF-8 native or by default, and my Unix file system (in this case FreeBSD UFS) appears to be in agreement.

The question is whether clients must support this as well, as in my experience so far all of them do but Martin's client seems to reject this link due to containing non-ASCII characters and doesn't handle it. He said that RFC3986 does not allow links to have non-ASCII characters, but perhaps this isn't relevant to Gemini's internal encoding and document format, but rather for exported URI's (ie made universal).

It does seem a proper URI should best contain %C4%9D in place of ĝ, but the question is whether I should change it in the document? Does the internal linking (in my case the link is local/relative) even count as a URI?

Ben

-- gemini://kwiecien.us/