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From: meff <email@example.com>
Subject: Re: Hey Geminispace
Date: Wed, 25 May 2022 19:21:14 +0000
Message-ID: <a6c2mi-iehc1.ln1@meff.me>
On 2022-05-25, D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com> wrote:
meff wrote:
>
> That said, NNTP is pretty crufty as a protocol. It has both
> stateful and stateless bits. The existing clients all speak variations
> of the RFC. SMTP has pretty similar problems, from what I can tell. It
> doesn't have a concept of hierarchy the way NNTP (loosely) does.
What I noticed recently is that many Internet application protocols are
fundamentally file transfer protocols: I have a file on my machine, and I
want to store or access it on another machine.
NNTP
HTTP
SMTP
POP
IMAP
FTP (obviously)
Gemini
Gopher
.... and others are all fundamentally file transfer
This is a good observation 🙂. File transfer protocols were some of
the earliest forms of RPC. Some of the original RPCs were developed as
OTT Modem protocols, like XMODEM and its descendants.
One of the reasons I like HTTP so much as a protocol is that it's
fundamentally stateless, which means it's basically a light layer of
human-readable ASCII framing atop arbitrary data. HTTP of course has
its warts. All I'd ever want from a network protocol is a bit of
framing around a bag of bytes. Something that gives me more
descriptive capabilities than the header of a single packet, and lets
me tie multiple packets together to a coherent "action". It's why I
hate protocols like SIP (and RTSP to some extent) which try to be very
opinionated on sending data.
Parent:
Re: Hey Geminispace (by D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com> on Wed, 25 May 2022 16:29:11 -0000 (UTC))
Start of thread:
Re: Hey Geminispace (by Ben <benk@tilde.team> on Mon, 14 Feb 2022 17:31:07 +0330)