CGI

[Luke Emmet]

A word of warning - as you probably have surmised, query string or 
otherwise manipulated URLs are not good for all types of application. 
They work just like HTTP GET queries and as such should really be 
limited to idempotent interactions with the server (like search queries 
or other peristent URLs).

There is nothing yet equivalent to a non-cacheable data submission to 
the server (like HTTP POST) yet. I think it would be great if there 
could be one, but nothing on the horizon at the moment.

So the complex URLs you can assemble in interactions with Gemini are 
subject to being linked to and replayed.

For example if I have a page on my site with 100 parametrised links to a 
gemini based guest book, every time GUS comes to visit, there could end 
up being 100 new entries posted!

Best wishes

  - Luke

On 17-Jul-2020 19:26, Paul Boyd wrote:
> Hmm.. interesting. I'm already packing data into the URL path, so 
> yeah, I can just put the rest of the data in there. I'll have to try 
> it out when I get a minute.
>
> The protocol spec has a max URL size of 1024 bytes, but as long as the 
> inputs are short I think it will work.
>
> Paul
>
> On Fri, Jul 17, 2020 at 1:37 PM Michael Lazar 
> <lazar.michael22 at gmail.com <mailto:lazar.michael22 at gmail.com>> wrote:
>
>     I like the form idea and I wrote something similar for gopher a
>     while back [0].
>
>     https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?=mozz.us+7005+312f64656d6f2d666f726d
>
>     In my case, I used URL query parameters to keep track of
>     previously submitted
>     form values. This worked because query params do not have any
>     special meaning
>     in gopher URLs. For gemini the query component is reserved, but
>     you could
>     probably accomplish the same thing using a special path component
>     with the
>     encoded fields in it.
>
>     gemini://example.com/cgi-bin/form/name%3Dpaul%26location%3Dcanada/
>     <http://example.com/cgi-bin/form/name%3Dpaul%26location%3Dcanada/>
>
>     - mozz
>
>     [0]
>     https://github.com/michael-lazar/flask-gopher/blob/master/demo/run_server.py#L154
>