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Proposal about content-size and hash

Björn Wärmedal bjorn.warmedal at gmail.com

Tue Nov 3 12:11:16 GMT 2020

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On Tue, 3 Nov 2020 at 12:49, Ali Fardan <raiz at stellarbound.space> wrote:

If so many people are not satisfied with the protocol as is without an
insane amount of features, why don't you move to a different protocol
that satisfies your needs? Or rather, define your own, the only reason
I'm interested in the Gemini protocol in the first place is the lack of
features, yet ever since I joined this community the majority of
discussion is all about feature proposals, why don't we get creative
with what we have?

I assume the majority of people who suggest a feature want "gemini + X",but everyone has their own idea of what X is :) If everyone built their ownprotocol instead, almost all of those would be doomed from the get-go. Toget traction a potential new protocol needs to be appealing to as many aspossible -- and the creator needs to *reach out* to as many as possible atthat!

The most sold pie in the US is apple pie. It's pretty much nobody'sfavourite, but it's virtually everyone's second-favourite.

The fact that so many feature proposals drop in suggests that Gemini hasdone mostly everything right and appeals to a whole truckload of people.It's a good thing, and it doesn't mean people *aren't* getting creativewith what they have (seehttps://portal.mozz.us/gemini/mozz.us/files/rfc_gemini_favicon.gmi forexample). The lack of content-size or hash is by no means a deal-breakerfor me; I'll find other ways to reduce bandwidth usage for my use case ifneed be. But that doesn't mean it *wouldn't be useful*, for my use case orothers'.

Petite Abeille have suggested the use of message/external-body MIME
type defined in RFC 1873 for such thing, and I know this looks like an
ugly solution, Guess what? so is adding content length to response
headers, the protocol was designed to make it impossible to do such
thing, lets keep it that way. And by the way, you could outsource
certain operations to external protocols if you really need that,
gemtext allows a clean way of specifying links to different protocol
schemes by design.

Well, if all I want is gemini + X, then using protocol Y with its bloat offeatures I *don't* need is less tempting than sending a feature proposal tothe gemini ML. And again, that's a good thing! It means people are engagingand shaping the trajectory of their own internet future. A rejectedproposal is a hundred times better than one that was never discussed forfear of ridicule or social repercussions. The community is alive andvibrant :D

Cheers,ew0k-------------- next part --------------An HTML attachment was scrubbed...URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20201103/d1c1bb61/attachment.htm>