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a space case for transparent gemtext compression

PJ vM pjvm742 at disroot.org

Sat Jun 19 12:13:20 BST 2021

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A bit of a recap and my thoughts:

Compression is not going to be in the protocol; this is a bad idea formultiple reasons, already pointed out.* Authors can of course offer a compressed version of a gemtext documentalongside the uncompressed version. It remains to be seen how manypeople would make use of the compressed version (depends, one mightsuppose, on people's internet speeds and how long the document inquestion is).* Client software could in theory recognise a compressed gemtext file,decompress it and display it as normal, giving the user the sameexperience as with a normal gemtext file. Probably not many clients willhave this functionality, but who knows.* Part of the goal with Gemini's simplicity is to avoid implementationmonoculture, so it is reasonablye to say for many users not using themost featureful client. However, given the great variety in Geminiusers, I think a monoculture will be avoided anyway, and a feature likeautomatic handling of compressed gemtext will never become mandatory. Idon't think proposing a feature that clients may implement is a threatto Geminispace.

Some people should reflect on what they said in this discussion and howthey said it: what parts of it were helpful and what parts weren't.Maybe they can avoid a similar mess in the future. Moving on...

On 19/06/2021 10:59, Stephane Bortzmeyer wrote:

* how the end user of a browser without compression support will know

in advance if the file is compressed or not? From the file extension?

It is not always present.

I expect authors would indicate this in the link text. So:

article.gmi my article=

article.gmi.gz my article (compressed version)

* today, every browser can read every Gemini file. Your proposal

seems to imply that some users will now see only a part of the

Geminispace, the uncompressed one. This is the same problem we have

when trying to use the Web with lynx or dillo: we can see only a part

of it.

First of all, people are already serving PDFs &c via Gemini, which isalso something that Gemini is intended for. So already, not the entireGeminispace is visible from within the Gemini client.

Secondly, I'd expect that authors offer a compressed version only inaddition to the uncompressed version, not as a replacement. I don't seethis feature becoming nearly popular enough for authors to start doingthe latter.

-- pjvm