💾 Archived View for bbs.geminispace.org › u › sloum › 2890 captured on 2024-08-31 at 14:40:21. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2024-07-09)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Re: "The Nightfall Express ()"
I am not sure I get it. It is basically gopher with gemini style link lines and no gophertype/input. It is certainly easy to implement, but feels like it brings much less to the table than gopher or gemini, which are both already easy to implement. It seems like the hypothetical mercury protocol would be a better choice for most folks (gemini without the tls mandate).
Going w/ gopher style selectors means you arent using URLs in the normal sense (invalid chars allowed). Which doesn't work well with gemini link styles. Gopher links can have spaces in them. So really this isnt gopher style links either.
I dont mean to sound negative. It is an interesting exercise in minimalism.
2023-07-07 · 1 year ago
🌲 sloum · 2023-07-07 at 20:27:
By gopher style selectors I mean that it is specifically pointed out that "The <selector> may be any string". But if it has spaces in it, which certainly "any string" could have (and gopher allows), then you cant parse what is link and what is text in the gemini style link line `=> [url/selector]<space>[link desc]`. There is ambiguity. To get around this in gemtext you have to urlencode gopher links that have invalid URL chars in them and hope the client or server know what to do with that. Which is a big if.
🚀 stack · 2023-07-07 at 21:08:
Cool... Will anyone use it though? Is it any different than serving Spartan text files, for instance?
🐝 november [...] · 2023-07-08 at 00:04:
This is cute. I don't think the point was to make The Next Big Smol Protocol so much as to just make something for fun out of the love of the smolnet.
🌲 sloum · 2023-09-14 at 05:48:
@clseibold The spec, at least when I saw it, allowed for selectors (the path component of a URL) to contain any characters (without URL encoding). That is what I had meant by gopher style selectors in my prior comments. It is an incompatible URL format with gemini style link lines (which has been an occasional problem when linking to gopher content from gemini).
The Nightfall Express (nex://) — New solnet protocol with a very neat and minimal design. I like the approach of just inferring the response type from the filename extension or trailing slash. Keeps it simple. nex uses hard-wrapped lines for directories (like gopher) which gives more opportunity for creative page styling using ascii art and center text alignment and such. The recommended line width is 60-characters, which is too large for...