💾 Archived View for rawtext.club › ~sloum › geminilist › 005849.gmi captured on 2024-03-21 at 16:36:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2021-11-30)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Petite Abeille petite.abeille at gmail.com
Tue Mar 2 10:44:25 GMT 2021
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
It has been made abundantly clear that Gemini is meant to be a frozen, immutable protocol — without any possible extensions whatsoever.
The forever protocol.
So be it.
Nevertheless, here is the outline of a small extension mechanism for Gemini: CAPA, short for capabilities.
CAPA manifest itself as a directive, expressed as an URN:
urn:gemini:capa
The CAPA directive itself returns a list of capabilities supported by a given service, if any, or an error code otherwise:
C: urn:gemini:capaS: 20 text/gemini=
urn:gemini:capa=
urn:gemini:capa:connection:keep-alive=
urn:gemini:capa:transfer-encoding:chunked=
urn:gemini:capa:turn<end of connection>
In this case, the service understand CAPA itself, plus a handful of other capabilities, such as persistent connection, and chunked transfer encoding.
A client enable a give capability by sending the relevant directive to the service:
C: urn:gemini:capa:connection:keep-aliveS: 10 Continue
To which the conformant service replies with an informational status code —10 Continue— acknowledging the new capability.
In this example —with the keep-alive capability enabled— the network connection is persistent and not dropped to indicate end-of-transmission after each request.
Additionally, keep-alive enables the chunked transfer encoding — as now the Gemini service needs a different mechanism to indicate end-of-transmission to the client.
Wrapping all this together:
C: urn:gemini:capa:connection:keep-aliveS: 10 ContinueC: gemini://host.xyz:/life-is-a-long-quiet-river.gmiS: 20 text/gemini;charset=utf-8;connection:keep-alive;transfer-encoding=chunked;4\r\nWiki\r\n (data)
6\r\npedia \r\n (data)
E\r\nin \r\n\r\nchunks.\r\n
0\r\n \r\n <service maintain connection, awaiting next request>
That's all folks.
±0¢