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[solderpunk]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2020 at 06:02:48PM +0200, Petite Abeille wrote:
> Cool.
> 
> May I suggest two further, hmmm, tightenings?
> 
> (1) Mandate a line length limit for every gemini artifacts, both protocol and text format. 1024 bytes for everything. 

With regard to the protocol, isn't this already the case?

>From section 2:

```
Gemini requests are a single CRLF-terminated line with the following
structure:

<URL><CR><LF>

<URL> is a UTF-8 encoded absolute URL, of maximum length 1024 bytes.
```

So, that's requests handled.

>From section 3.1:

```
Gemini response headers look like this:

<STATUS><SPACE><META><CR><LF>

<STATUS> is a two-digit numeric status code, as described below in 3.2 and in
Appendix 1.

<META> is a UTF-8 encoded string of maximum length 1024 bytes, whose
meaning is <STATUS> dependent.
```

So, that's responses handled.

What am I forgetting?

With regard to lines of text/gemini, that's unfortunately not really
compatible with the idea that content should be written with long lines
and then wrapped by the client to fit the viewport.  It took *months* of
discussion and arguing to settle on that convention and now that I've
had a chance to see it in action I'm actually pretty fond of it.  Having
content display cleanly on different devices is quite nice, and almost a
pre-requisite for widespread adoption in the modern world (not that
widespread adoption is an explicit goal of the project, but there's no
reason to stand in the way of it without good cause).  I can't think of
any way to achieve that property with a short fixed line length that
doesn't tremendously complicate rendering.

What's the motivation for this in text/gemini?

> (2) Normalize all the sigils to <SIGIL><SPACE>. Drop the optional whitespace concoction [<whitespace>].

Does anybody else have strong feelings on this, one way or the other?
After the change to the list item definition, this *would* increase
consistency in the spec, which is generally a good thing.  But dealing
with optional whitespace is not exactly difficult for clients to do and
I feel like a little bit of flexibility in something designed to be
written by humans is not a bad thing...

Cheers,
Solderpunk