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Is streaming a normative protocol expectation? (was Re: Documents with mixed languages)

Sean Conner sean at conman.org

Mon Dec 13 19:10:39 GMT 2021

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It was thus said that the Great Luke Emmet once stated:

Yes there would be an ambiguity in the spec if streaming clients are
expected or normative. Personally I think it is intentional that the
spec aims to keep the complexity of implementation low, as that is in
keeping with the rest of Gemini's design approach. Implementing a
streaming client is more complex, and there are more cases that would
need to be specified to resolve protocol ambiguity. For example how does
a client tell the difference between a poorly behaved server that is
just dripping a few bytes out second by second and one that is a
streaming service? I can't see how it can, particularly given that there
are no content-length headers in Gemini.

If you receive a MIME type of "audio/*", "video/*" or "text/event-stream"[1], then you probably would want to stream the data or expect to spendsome time downloading the entire content (or abort entirely if you get"text/event-stream").

And there's nothing in the spec that precludes a client from dealing withdata in a streaming way (even *if* it may be more complicated).

-spc

[1] Yup, it's a thing.

https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/server-sent-events.html