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a space case for transparent gemtext compression

Ben benulo at systemli.org

Sat Jun 19 16:36:11 BST 2021

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I kind of skimmed over this surprisingly heated debate on compression, so I will try to keep my thoughts short:

I agree compression is unnecessary. Given what resources we have at our disposal (storage space, processing power, network bandwidth), Gemini is already far lighter than what our systems could handle. With compression enabled, we will gain little in speed or storage.

I agree that compression is cool. Yes, I like transferring 90kb instead of 300kb. It jut seems neat, and for end users might still provide a noticeable speed improvement for larger documents.

Adding compression to my site would break compatibility with a lot of Gemini browsers currently out there. This is probably not worth it. Gemini derives strength from being fixed standard, as its impressive levels of adoption and software development have affirmed.

In the past I tossed the idea around with a friend on the idea of making a Gemini capsule downloadable for offline use in a single, compressed archive. This eliminates a massive amount of overhead at the protocol level, since I could provide a compressed archive of 100 Gemini pages to the client in seconds compared to what would potentially take a very long time for the client to make 100 individual requests. This could greatly improve the efficacy of crawlers / search engines and people who for some reason would like to read my entire capsule in one go.

I think rather than bothering to compress individual files, we should be thinking about compressed archives/mirrors.

Ben

-- gemini://kwiecien.us/