Proposal about content-size and hash

[Ali Fardan]

On Tue, 03 Nov 2020 14:07:49 +0000
khuxkm at tilde.team wrote:
> I don't really think this is a scenario where there are things that
> weren't "intended"; what was intended was to create a protocol,
> lighter than the Web and heavier than Gopher, for serving content
> securely (at least, from where I sit and what I see). Obviously, the
> protocol isn't perfect, so sometimes it needs things added that may
> not have been there at the beginning, but fit the intent of the
> protocol.

Let me reword... weren't considered from the beginning, here is an
example: 5.4.2 from the spec goes into great detail even defining what
whitespace is, while 5.5.2 and 5.5.3 aren't defined in the same style
as 5.4.2 was defined, there's nothing wrong with that, the protocol
evolved and these were added later, though they weren't considered at
the very beginning, that's what I meant by weren't "intended".

> The spec was created around August of 2019 (at least, the list was
> first posted to in mid-August). It's only a year old. If a breaking
> change *needs* to be made, it's not too late yet.

If a crucial change were to be made, of course, I'm all for it, but in
my opinion, it seems that there is no need for any more features to be
added, and the way I see it is moving towards stabilizing the spec
without any breaking changes, that's just my opinion.

> That's not really a good comparison. Obviously you wouldn't add
> revision control and/or a remote shell to Gemini; that has nothing to
> do with serving content. But if the X in "gemini + X" has to do with
> content (serving it, etc.), it's worth considering.

I may have went to the extreme with this, but take a look at web land,
there's applications written to entirely run on the web, those include
mail readers, video and music players (implemented in JS), document
editors (Google docs and whatnot), and finally, control panels which
serve the purpose of a remote shell, obviously, that's not SSH, but if
more and more features get accepted to the protocol, how long until
that becomes possible?

Applications can be implemented in Gemini currently, using CGI, these
applications don't have to do with serving content, you could implement
a calculator, a banner generator, and a git repository viewer, all
using what is currently available, I have no argument against
implementing such applications using CGI which currently allows
extending the protocol without requiring more features to be added.