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

[Luke Emmet]

On 14-Jun-2020 16:05, solderpunk wrote:
> According to GUS, currently more than half of the text/gemini content
> out there is less than 1.2 KiB in size.  If URLs were allowed to be 2048
> bytes long, all that content could be uploaded as a query.
>
> I do not have hard numbers on this (Alex may be able to provide them),
> but I would *imagine* that most edits to wikis, when expressed as diffs,
> would also be much less than 1 KiB.
>
> Can we solve a lot of these issues by bumping up our maximum URL length
> and, perhaps, defining a new 1x status code meaning "I'm asking you for
> some input and in this context it's quite reasonable that you might want
> to submit something on the long side", which clients could optionally
> respond to by launching a text editor instead of just reading a single
> line of input?  Clients which chose to support this code would become
> the preferred clients of wiki enthusiasts or people who don't want to or
> don't know how to use scp etc.
>
> It should also be very easy to write an app targetted at "non-technical"
> authors which lets them submit chunks of writing up to 2 KiB or so, with
> an "append" link at the submission confirmation page to submit a follow
> up chunk.  It wouldn't necessarily be the smoothest experience in the
> world, but if most content could be written in a single request and 99%
> with one or two "append" requests, I think it would be usable enough.
> Heck, this is the "slow internet", right?  A little bit of inconvenience
> as part of a careful and deliberate process should not scare us away.

I think this is a great idea! It would go quite a long way to supporting 
collaborative editing. And as you say it is infrastructure we already have.

if your lines are about 25 characters long, 2kb is about 80 lines worth 
of text. That seems a nice sweet spot to me.

We could argue if you need more than that you will be better placed to 
find a more flexible upload option.

The only other part to the jigsaw in my view is a way to integrate the 
editing experience into the client so you can *round-trip* the content. 
As we know the first edit is seldom a perfect one.

The basic wiki concept has the following:

1. Page displays content (we can do that)
2. Edit mode of the existing page content
3. Upload (2k allowed - OK)
4. Review submitted content (return to 1)

For step 2, we want the user to be able to edit the existing content, 
not necessarily compose completely afresh.

One suggestion is that clients MAY present an integrated editor bound to 
a preformatted region on a page (perhaps the first one or a user 
selected one). This allows the re-editing of the existing content. This 
is then what is submitted when writing back via the submission.

This would cover the full lifecycle of simple yet basic wiki editing.

Best Wishes

  - Luke