Hannu Hartikainen hannu.hartikainen+gemini at gmail.com
Sun Jul 19 10:28:03 BST 2020
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Hi!
On Sat, 18 Jul 2020 at 16:47, Paul Boyd <boyd.paul2 at gmail.com> wrote:
Anyway, I'm probably not going to write something like this again. The guestbook is kind of fun (Hello Kévin and Timur!), so I'll leave it up. But I'll stick to things that fit better in the future.
I think it's really valuable to *try* all kinds of things anddifferent approaches to see *what* fits well. IMHO we have onlyscratched the surface of what is possible with the Gemini protocol(and what makes for good UX).
To summarize what has been discussed here:1. Filling in multiple values is not trivial with the input response type2. One way is to generate a session id on the server. (This isstateful, which has some downsides but avoids replay issues.)3. Another way is to embed all the responses in the URL.
Some ideas that haven't been mentioned:
a. If you include all the fields at once, you could just ask for themin one request. Eg. "10 name;location;link;comment" which the user issmart enough to parse and respond with "Hannu;;;This is cool!". Or fora better UX, make the fields newline-separated (ie. %0A in the URL)and have multiline-capable input fields in browsers. Note: this isagainst a strict interpretation of the spec but hasn't been discussedAFAIK.
b. Instead of having different links for different fields, you couldask for the fields in succession (but this only works well for thesession id based approach). Eg. /guestbook/sign responds with "30/guestbook/sign/aF3d", then /guestbook/sign/aF3d responds with "10Name", /guestbook/sign/aF3d?Hannu with "10 Location (optional)", then"10 Link (optional)" and "10 Comment" in sequence, saving each querystring to the server-side session. After the final response eithersave the comment or show the responses with a link to save.
I personally think the Gemini protocol (as it currently is) can be aspowerful as the UNIX command line (note: only CLI, not TUI). In fact,you could serve a remote shell over Gemini. Of course we're allspoiled by interactive software even in a terminal so Gemini feelsquite limited.
-Hannu