Should Gemini clients alert users upon redirect?

[Sandra Snan]

mailinglists at ngalt.com writes:
> It was.

Thank you so much for reading my stuff♥♥
Much apprec♥

> I'd be _very_ happy to read arguments in favor of slashless.

It is a way to write future-proof links that work on both dynamic and
static content.

This is a site that has survived several CMS changes and has been up
with the same look for 11 years.

Earlier version of Jekyll allowed slashless without redirecting, not
sure how it worked but it stopped working so I've altered my nginx conf
to just serve them as directories with index.html files, and Molly of
course has index.gmi out of the box. I didn't want to change my linking
style from the old site in the hopes that one day I'll have a CMS that
once more has slashless URLs.

The _counter_ argument to that, then, is that dynamic url routers could
be configured to add faux slashes back in to match. And that's a good
counter-argument. Anything you can do to make your site consistent is
good. And the dynamic portion of my site (the Fedi frontent) currently
does allow faux trailing slashes.

Bogan's text was written in 2002 and his own site has, as you point out,
had some rough times when it comes to consistency:
> Time and CMS changes have not been good to the article. You'll need to
> hover over the links in the code snippets and look at your
> link-preview bar/popup to see what he's talking about.

He wrote that before nginx came out, in the Apache era. Nginx just
serves the file right up without a bunch of redirects (hopefully—I
haven't triple checked that).

Now, I do appreciate you alerting me that Molly does do the similar
shenanigans that

Bogan describes:
> Just a minute; first I’ll try to find a file called ‘subdirectory.’ …
> Wait a second; it’s not there! How about a directory called
> ‘subdirectory?’ … Ah, here we go. Okay. And next time, please use a
> trailing slash.

That's something I would hope could change in future versions of Molly.

Also, my capsule might not always be on Molly. (Even though it's a
fantastic server.♥)

The bottom line is that the indented external semantics is that requests
are asking for content, and those requests should be separated from the
specific implementation, such as file system representation.