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Omar Polo op at omarpolo.com
Tue Oct 5 16:15:10 BST 2021
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Chris McGee <newton688 at gmail.com> writes:
I feel that using Gemini for things where other established protocols are better designed for the task is a path to it becoming just
another web protocol that tries to do everything, poorly. A much better model might be something like Unix where you have tools
that do their thing well and also work together well.
I agree with that, there are surely better way to chat!
I was mostly trying to get some fun with the streaming ability oftext/gemini, and the chat was the first thing I could think of, and alsothe easiest to implement (it's crap written in less than 50 lines ofshell, including blanks.) It's more of a demonstration of how easy anduseful streaming pages can be.
Thinking of text/gemini as a (possibly) "infinite" stream of lines is aninteresting perks of gemini, and can unlock the creation of simple, yetvery powerful applications. Think of a fediverse instance over gemini,or maybe station, with a "feed" page that streams toots/posts. Or anews site that streams live events.
Now, not every capsule needs to stream pages of course, but I was mostlytrying to bring up the point again, and see if it stimulates someoneto create something more useful. ;-)
Having said that, I wonder if Gemtext would be a decent marking down content in a chat system, such as IRC, or in a great many
other places in a Gemini fediverse. Line orientation could be a nice feature there.
On Mon, Oct 4, 2021 at 2:45 PM Omar Polo <op at omarpolo.com> wrote:
Hello,
One of the things that I love about text/gemini is how it's easy to
parse, and being it line-based it's also really easy to stream it. When
I started working on telescope, the idea of being able to stream content
was present in the design of the parser from the first draft -- it also
fit nicely with separation in multiple processes (one process does the
fetching, another one the rendering, and messages are sent from one proc
to the other.) But other than knowing from the code that it should
work, I never played with this aspect of text/gemini.
Fast forward various months, I've just watched the "Why gemini" video by
Tomasino and I got an urge to build something with streaming text. I'm
attaching a very, very simple CGI script that streams text/gemini to
build an interactive chatroom.
The idea is similar to the one presented by solderpunk in "A vision for
gemini applications"
gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/users/solderpunk/gemlog/a-vision-for-gemini-applications.gmi
and, frankly, I'm quite disappointed nobody has built something like
this before. (or at least I haven't been able to find it. I know
kensanata has made some experiments with a mush, but I haven't played
with it (yet))
The idea is to provide two pages: one that accepts input via the
response code 10 and appends to a file, the second is a literal `tail
-f'. Simple, but it works, and it's immediate. As soon as someone
sends something, all the clients reading from `tail -f' gets the
message.
(the various `tail -f' gets eventually killed by a SIGPIPE when the
client closes the connection and the server closes the script stdout.
It could take a while due to the buffering, but can be worked out. I
don't know if servers are expected to kill the spawned scripts -- I
don't recall anything from the RFC -- but I'm probably wrong. gmid
anyway doesn't kill the scripts, it let UNIX do its things with signals.
Feature or bug? dunno.)
It doesn't require a client certificates, but uses the subject of it if
provided. There's a check that can be de-commented to enforce the usage
of client certificates.
I'm hosting a demo at
gemini://gemini.omarpolo.com/cgi/lets-chat
but I don't promise to keep it online. It's a quick-n-dirty script
(less than 50 lines of -hopefully- portable sh), probably filled with
bugs, wrote only to be a demonstration. I don't want to moderate it
if/when people write things. It's really easy to host it locally, for
e.g. using gmid (disclaimer: I'm the author)
$ gmid -x '*' .
from the same directory where you saved the script.
It seems to work with Telescope, Tinmop and Lagrange. Kristall and
Amfora don't seem to support streaming, or maybe I have an old version.
Elpher doesn't stream by design.
I hope this inspires someone to build amazing things with the streaming
capability of text/gemini. There are a lot of possibilities, for
instance capsules like station could stream the feed, or the
notification page; it could be better than clients continously
refreshing the page. Think of it like some sort of "websockets" but for
humans ;)
Gemini clients could "ring" or use some other kind of mechanism to
inform the user that more content is available in a page (for
e.g. Telescope adds a `!' before the tab title.)
Cheers,
Omar Polo
P.S.: this is also a partial reply to the talkat spec. I love seeing
what creative things folks are building, and I really hope the best for
mbays and their idea (if I got the paternity correctly :P), but I also
like the idea of doing these sort of things over gemini. On one hand I
don't want to push gemini over its boundaries, on the other I love doing
that :)