"Wide load" status code(s)?

[Matthew Graybosch]

On Wed, 10 Jun 2020 20:03:37 +0000
solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> wrote:

> I was going to quip that I had already recommended everybody do this
> in the Best Practices document and moan once again that nobody ever
> reads it...then and checked and, whoops, it's not in there!  How'd
> that happen?

Maybe you had more pressing concerns?
 
> I think it is definitely polite to explicitly indicate file sizes for
> anything larger than, I dunno, 10 MiB or thereabouts?

I'd suggest warning for 1MB because I doubt that most text content
served on Gemini protocol would exceed 100KB per file, and because
section 3.3 of the spec explicitly states that servers are not supposed
to compress content before sending it down the pipe. I mean, I'd love to
see more writers adopt Gemini for long-form work, but I think most
gemlog posts range from 250-2000 words, which might be 25KB at most.

I looked at the markdown file for my trunk novel, and it weighs in at
1.6MB for 289,000 words. I shudder to think of what one might find in a
text file weighing 10MB or more. I'm thinking of something like the
collected works of Leo Tolstoy or a partial dump of Equifax's data
as of 2020.

Of course, 1.6MB is fine on a decent broadband connection, and even
10MB, but I still remember what it was like to try install Gentoo from
stage one (hundreds of megabytes of code) on a dialup connection. It
wasn't fun.

> Relatedly, as of a semi-recent update, the automatically generated
> directory listings produced by Molly Brown include file sizes.

That's sure to come in handy.

-- 
Matthew Graybosch		https://www.matthewgraybosch.com
#include <disclaimer.h>		gemini://starbreaker.org
Harrisburg, PA			gemini://demifiend.org
"Out of order?! Even in the future nothing works."