Stephane Bortzmeyer stephane at sources.org
Wed Sep 22 17:57:02 BST 2021
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On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 09:41:44AM +0100, Alice <lia at loveisanalogue.info> wrote a message of 39 lines which said:
Are there any protocols that could be used with (say) Gemini for
capsules that are not always online ?
That could be interesting for some low-tech environments such asservers powerd by solar energy (whch is not almways available)<https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html>.
The expectation that the whole internet is always online feels like
a massive waste of resource.
I agree. Some protocols (UUCP, DTN, etc) are designed for intermittentconnectivity. (For DTN, start with RFC 4838<gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/rfc-mirror/rfc4838.txt> then RFC 5050and 5325.)
It should be ok for a capsule to say "hey, I'm not online. Come back
later, or check this mirror". Instead we get fatal looking errors.
In the lively discussion in this thread about machine-readablevs. human-readable text, nobody mentioned the serious issue ofinternationalization. Not everyone reads english.
Maybe custom TXT DNS entries could specify when to expect the
capsule to be available, and where to find mirrors ?
Since unavailability of the capsule may not be known in advance (suchas with the example of a solar-powered capsule), DNS, with its caches,may not be the best solution.