File size issues

[solderpunk]

On Sun, Aug 18, 2019 at 11:36:41AM +0000, solderpunk wrote:
 
> Yeah, I think we can leave this for now.  It was a hypothetical concern
> that somebody had.  Not necessarily a bad one, but until it's observed
> actually creating significant trouble for actual users on actual clients
> I think we can just table this issue.  If it does come up as a practical
> concern, we can resume discussion of some of the ideas here.

Well, I guess this is no longer quite so hypothetical, as Konpeito has
given us large binary files over Gemini.  I noticed that this was an
unpleasant user experience to download via AV-98 (with the client
appearing to "hang" for a long time during the download).  And, in fact,
I did receive an email from one person telling me they liked Gemini a
lot, who mentioned that they had not been able to download the Konpeito
album.  I strongly suspect that, in fact, they just didn't realise their
client was slowly downloading it.

One possible solution to the user experience problem that doesn't
require the client actually knowing the file size is to display, instead
of a progress bar, some kind of "stuff is happening" indicator, e.g. an
animated spinner (you know, of the /, -, \, | kind) accompanied by a 
count of KiB / MiB downloaded so far?  That would at least make it
obvious to users that something was happening.

And a convention of specifying filesizes for large binary files in the
link text would allow rough mental calculation of progress?

Cheers,
Solderpunk