💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 005085.gmi captured on 2024-02-05 at 11:14:45. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

<-- back to the mailing list

Proposal to drop double slashes from URL syntax

Daniel Nagy danielnagy at posteo.de

Tue Feb 9 16:12:57 GMT 2021

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - 

Hello,

I want to propose to drop the double slashes from the gemini URL syntax.

The reason for this is that they dont serve any semantic value and while theproject is still young, I think it could still be changed. So instead of

gemini://example.com

we would have:

gemini:example.com

In fact, Sir Tim Berners-Lee apologized[0] for introducing them in the http URLsyntax. I see the following advantages and disadvantages:

Advantages: - Less typing - Less wasted screenspace - Less transfered bytes and less stored bytes on disk and memory

Disadvantages: - Newcomers might see familiarities with http in the double slashed syntax and recognize, that the following token is a hostname, which will be contacted. There is a chance that, without the slashes, newcomers might expect something else than a hostname after the color, although I personally think that chance is low. - Implementations would need to adapt to this and some URL parsers in their respective languages might not support the parsing of such syntax. - Automatic URL detectors, like for example a terminal emulators where you can click on a URL and it openes, might have trouble detecting this URL form and therefore not recognize links. Those terminal emulators would need adaption.

Of course, the double slashed syntax could still be supported, but the morecompact format could be encouraged. Any feedback or suggestions would greatly bewelcomed.

Regards,Daniel

[0]: https://www.sitepoint.com/sir-tim-berners-lee-http-slashes/