gemini+submit:// (was Re: Uploading Gemini content)

[Martin Keegan]

On Sat, 13 Jun 2020, case wrote:

> On June 13, 2020 2:56:35 PM MDT, solderpunk <solderpunk at SDF.ORG> wrote:

>> 3. Dear God, when/where/how does it stop?!  This was supposed to be a
>> simple, humble, protocol of limited scope!
>
> To me, this is key and exactly where the web went off the rails. If this 
> is embraced by the community it becomes a defacto standard; clients that 
> do not support it will be considered less. This is what happened to 
> mosaic and Netscape.

> Why does this have to be a part of or associated with gemini at all? Why 
> not build a separate protocol and client and build a community of 
> authors around it?

I think an upload protocol should *not* be developed. We should instead 
concentrate on creating the *content* that should be uploaded, and 
improving the *existing* tools for getting content onto servers.

Until I started using Gemini, I had avoided learning how to use TRAMP in 
Emacs - it is a system which allows you to edit remote files, so you open 
up /ssh:gemini.ucant.org:public_gemini/index.gemini in the editor, and it 
does SFTP to gemini.ucant.org and edits public_gemini/index.gemini for you 
transparently. It knows about ftp and a bunch of other protocols. 
Similarly, there are all sorts of user-space filesystems out there 
nowadays, such as sshfs, and good old git post-receive hooks and NFS 
automounts. The situation on Windows is apparently even better.
So my conventional "rsync this directory to the right spot on the server" 
script is basically redundant.

I'd say, Keep Gemini Simple, and improve the documentation and tooling for 
*existing* systems of "how do I update this file on the server". I'd also 
caution that WebDAV never took off, and this looks like GeminiDAV. And 
finally I'd caution that making things easier for the those who are not 
"technically savvy" should almost never be at the cost of indirectly
making it harder for those who are.

Mk

-- 
Martin Keegan, +44 7779 296469, @mk270, https://mk.ucant.org/