馃懡 gnuserland

One thing I still don't get about Gemini - unfortunately I didn't follow the Gemini's evolution hence there quite few things I still don't get.

One of those is the reason why Gemini requires to close each line in the MS-DOS flavor.

I may understand that Win is still the predominant OS in the market but since Gemini is an internet thing and the 90% of Internet is built upon Unix-like servers I have difficult to understand the underlying reason; it looks unusual and a bit annoying if you are a *nix guy.

Is there any real technical motivation in that specification or it is just an unfortunate coincidence?

3 years ago 路 馃憤 lykso

Actions

馃憢 Join Station

6 Replies

馃懡 mcoffin

I could just be nuts, since it wouldn't even really be a URL at that point, but couldn't this actually allow for true newline characters in the request? It's probably completely invalid in the protocol as it stands now, and should be url-encoded anyways, but mayyybe that was a thought that came across since the request has to contain almost all the information you want to send for a given operation? Just a thought, as that's what I *assumed* it was chosen for. 路 3 years ago

馃懡 gnuserland

Thanks goodness this was really driving crazy... I totally misunderstood it... 馃槄 路 3 years ago

馃懡 kevinsan

Yes, your files can be entirely Unix format, it's only the server that has to end its e.g. 20 text/gemini response with \r\n - it's old Internet history (https://www.rfc-editor.org/old/EOLstory.txt) 路 3 years ago

https://www.rfc-editor.org/old/EOLstory.txt

馃懡 defunct

I know I do.... I open vim, set utf8 and start typing. I never had a thought about it. I mean consider serving a text file, an image, etc. you can't just add the line feed to a pdf? it still needs to transmit. from a protocol pov this is handled. what a client does with it is still up to the client 路 3 years ago

馃懡 gnuserland

So do I totally mistaken the sense of CLFR and I can save my GMI files with Unix ending line? 馃槄 路 3 years ago

馃懡 defunct

you mean the crlf? you don't have to do that, no. the only two places you need it is to terminate the request and to declare the response mime type. for the protocol that's enough. and crlf isn't uncommon. it has little to do with an msdos editor using it for newlines. if I am not mistaken it's from telnet, and the ability to debug an interface with telnet 路 3 years ago