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Paul Boyd boyd.paul2 at gmail.com
Sun Jul 19 13:59:21 BST 2020
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I did consider a succession of inputs. I think we can all agree that asuccession of modal inputs is irritating, and the UI would be exactly thaton most clients.
Asking the user to use a separator seemed error prone, so I didn't want todo that either. I know it can work. makeworld's gemlikes has a prompt of:
Enter your username, a space, and your comment
Usernames don't have spaces, and comments do, so this works great here. I'mjust not sure people are going to get "name;location;link;comment" rightconsistently. I certainly wouldn't, I'd end up with "paul;;my comment"instead of "paul;;;my comment" and get my comment in the link field.
Your UNIX command-line comment is interesting. One set of input args isenough for UNIX, so maybe getopt style flags?
--name John --location "From Beyond" --comment "This is what I have to say"
A form still seems right for a guestbook (the real-life version is a formafter all). But there ought to be something interesting we can do withflags on the input line. Maybe an ASCII art drawing program? With inputslike "line --from 0,0 --to 10,10".
Paul
On Sun, Jul 19, 2020 at 5:28 AM Hannu Hartikainen <hannu.hartikainen+gemini at gmail.com> wrote:
Hi!
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 at 16:47, Paul Boyd <boyd.paul2 at gmail.com> wrote:
Anyway, I'm probably not going to write something like this again. The
guestbook is kind of fun (Hello Kévin and Timur!), so I'll leave it up. But
I'll stick to things that fit better in the future.
I think it's really valuable to *try* all kinds of things and
different approaches to see *what* fits well. IMHO we have only
scratched the surface of what is possible with the Gemini protocol
(and what makes for good UX).
To summarize what has been discussed here:
1. Filling in multiple values is not trivial with the input response type
2. One way is to generate a session id on the server. (This is
stateful, which has some downsides but avoids replay issues.)
3. Another way is to embed all the responses in the URL.
Some ideas that haven't been mentioned:
a. If you include all the fields at once, you could just ask for them
in one request. Eg. "10 name;location;link;comment" which the user is
smart enough to parse and respond with "Hannu;;;This is cool!". Or for
a better UX, make the fields newline-separated (ie. %0A in the URL)
and have multiline-capable input fields in browsers. Note: this is
against a strict interpretation of the spec but hasn't been discussed
AFAIK.
b. Instead of having different links for different fields, you could
ask for the fields in succession (but this only works well for the
session id based approach). Eg. /guestbook/sign responds with "30
/guestbook/sign/aF3d", then /guestbook/sign/aF3d responds with "10
Name", /guestbook/sign/aF3d?Hannu with "10 Location (optional)", then
"10 Link (optional)" and "10 Comment" in sequence, saving each query
string to the server-side session. After the final response either
save the comment or show the responses with a link to save.
I personally think the Gemini protocol (as it currently is) can be as
powerful as the UNIX command line (note: only CLI, not TUI). In fact,
you could serve a remote shell over Gemini. Of course we're all
spoiled by interactive software even in a terminal so Gemini feels
quite limited.
-Hannu
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