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Francis Siefken fsiefken at gmail.com
Sat Jun 19 17:22:49 BST 2021
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Hi Gnuserland, you wrote today:
As Author I have to decide if to use or not use compression, HTML/HTTP
doesn't use compression so far I know.
The HTTP protocol supports compression; for example "Content-Encoding:zstd"=
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc8478#section-3If both the client and server support gzip or zstd compression a compressedstream is established. Yes this causes a developer overhead, that's why Iwas happy to read compression is in TLS 1.2 and dismayed that it wasremoved in TLS 1.3. While it's not removed in HTTP it warns against it'suse in certain situations, which do or do not apply in Gemini context:
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https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc2616 HTTP/1.1 section oncompression=
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc7540#section-10.6 HTTP/2compression section=
https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/draft-ietf-quic-http-34#page-47HTTP/3 compression section
It doesn't have to be difficult to mandate or implement an easy solution.
Suppose I am in a life or death situation and I am on a 300 bps link I wantthe 2 kilobyte of life-saving information to be there as soon as possible.Or you have the daily top 12 HN threads mirrored as a Gemtext file (~100Kilobyte each) and want to read those on a 300 bps link.Compression speeds up the process. With zstd compression and dictionarycompression https://facebook.github.io/zstd/#small-data it can be therequicker and on low end hardware.I think it would be elegant not to rely on having two seperate files forthis on the server, one index.gmi and one index.gmi.zstd - the Geminispecification could allow index.gmi to be a binary and let the browsercheck this after retrieval. If it's a zstd binary automatically extract anddisplay it.Ofcourse keeping this poor man's content sniffing method as simple andsecure as possible.=
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_sniffing Wikipedia on Contentsniffing
As mentioned by others in this thread a index.gmi.zstd could also beextracted through the existing application/zstd mime-type automatically anddisplay the resulting gmi inline - but as the protocol doesn't enforce thiseach client can implement it differently.To me it seems like a minimal change to the Gemini protocol to allow gmitext to be served in zstd format and to state that the client mustdecompress and display it inline instead of merely offering to download it.
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