Questions on INPUT behavior

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Michael Lazar once stated:
> On Wed, Aug 28, 2019 at 11:59 AM Sean Conner <sean at conman.org> wrote:
> >   Wait a second ... I thought gopher URLs don't support the query type.
> > It's not mentioned at all in RFC-4266 (and there are no updates as far as I
> > can see).
> 
> >From RFC-4266:
> 
>    <selector> is the Gopher selector string.  In the Gopher protocol,
>    Gopher selector strings are a sequence of octets that may contain any
>    octets except 09 hexadecimal (US-ASCII HT or tab), 0A hexadecimal
>    (US-ASCII character LF), and 0D (US-ASCII character CR).
> 
> Aside for those 3 reserved octets, you can stick anything you want in the
> selector part of the URL. Query string don't have any special meaning to
> gopher, they're just additional bytes in the selector that get sent to the
> server.

  I did try your site with my gopher client and it worked fine.  I'm just
not used to seeing query strings with gopher URLs.

> >  Add on to the path component?  I did a very short version of that for my
> > guessing game:
> 
> This would lead to a bunch of different paths that point to the same resource:
> 
>     /search/tag_37/tag_5/image_1/
>     /search/tag_5/tag_37/image_1/
>     /search/image_1/tag_5/tag_37/
>     ...

  Unless you maintain then in some canonical ordering (say, tags in sort
order, then images in sort order, etc.).  Might be more problem than it's
worth, but it is a solution.

  The path of a URL has nothing to do with a filesystem---it's just a
convention.  The link gemini://gemini.conman.org/qotd is not a file, nor a
directory.  Nor is gemini://gemini.conman.org/bible/ a directory (or a file
for that matter).  

> Of course, I could write my server to be able to understand and parse these
> path components. But it throws the whole "path as a hierarchy" paradigm out
> the window. I can only assume that this issue is why query param key-value
> pairs were invented in the first place.

  The path is an abstract reference to a resource.  It's only hierarchial in
your mind.  There is no spoon.

  -spc