New user, spec details

[kooda at upyum.com]

Hi!

I’ve been browsing the Gemini space for about a week and so far I love
it! I just fired up my own server and intend to contribute to the content
soon.

I also skimmed the mailing list and there are still a few details of the
spec I would like to discuss:

First, in the overview of the transaction (#1.1), it appears to me that
the client must wait for the server to close the connection before doing
anything with the response. It seems to be an unnecessary constraint,
especially since the text/gemini format is designed to be handled line by
line without needing to store the whole document. It would also enable
rendering of progressive images, playing audio files, etc during the
transfer.

In the same section, as well as #3.3 Response bodies, it is stated that
the server closes the connection after the document is sent. I think it
would be interesting to be a little more precise and state that the server
sends a close_notify from the TLS layer before closing the connection. It
would make it possible for clients to detect a truncated download and warn
the user about it.

I would also like to know the general opinion about TLS session caches. It
could be used as a light tracking tool… but I don’t think it’s that
bad. IP address and requests timing can also be used in the same way to
track users on a single server. And if someone really wanted, they could
just serve unique URLs to each visitor to track their movements on their
server.