Mercury

[Hannu Hartikainen]

On Tue, 23 Jun 2020 at 19:17, William Casarin <jb55 at jb55.com> wrote:

> setting it up is not the issue. I'm just not a fan of the extra
> complexity and latency[1]. I would prefer to use a protocol that is as
> snappy as gopher but with a nicer syntax that is more markdown-friendly.
> Mercury seems to fit that bill quite nicely.
>

The Gemini spec does not *require* TCP, so similar levels of snappiness
could be achieved with QUIC. It does the connection handshake
simultaneously with the TLS handshake, ending up with no more handshake
messages than the classical TCP SYN / SYN+ACK / ACK handshake.

You could get still snappier with a connectionless protocol. I just
captured a single page load of Gopherpedia using Wireshark. Guess how many
Ethernet frames? 11. These text based protocols are not optimized for speed
or simplicity (as in minimizing abstraction layers). We are all standing on
the shoulders of giants.

-Hannu
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20200623/5aa92565/attachment.htm>