[ANN] GemIF - Simple Interactive Fiction engine for Gemini

[Luke Emmet]

On 04-Dec-2020 09:55, Côme Chilliet wrote:
> Le vendredi 4 décembre 2020, 00:20:05 CET Nick Thomas a écrit :
>> A simple example - imagine I build a gemini client that prefetches all
>> links on the current page in the background, for performance.
> I just wanted to point out that this is forbidden by the specification:
> «Clients can present links to users in whatever fashion the client author wishes, however clients MUST NOT automatically make any network connections as part of displaying links whose scheme corresponds to a network protocol (e.g. links beginning with gemini://, gopher://, https://, ftp:// , etc.).»

I get the strong recommendation on this - and I take this to be a strong 
recommendation/exhortation for human facing clients behaviour. Its not a 
protocol invariant that must be preserved to ensure correct transmission 
or anything.

Some user facing clients (for example one of the web proxies) load 
linked images as an "experimental" feature.

But I get that there is a strong cultural exhortation against the 
expectation that images will be loaded. Personally for a human facing 
client I prefer that the images are not automatically loaded, or 
expected by the author that they will be loaded (unlike the web).

And we need to consider that the ecosystem does not just contain human 
facing clients - there are proxies, archivers, indexers, which are also 
Gemini clients. They will be traversing geminispace as well, at their 
own time, schedule and frequency.

  - Luke