Three possible uses for IRIs

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great bie once stated:
> >   I know Solderpunk wants to do a series of freezes then thaws as things are
> > worked on, but I think things progress a bit faster than he can deal with,
> > or wants to deal with, given his long absences on the list.
> 
> I'd love to see a spec freeze, too. There are already a lot of gemini
> servers, clients and other tools out there and breaking changes should
> be avoided unless absolutely necessary.
> 
> >   For me personally, I think this should be worked out, and I'm working
> > towards that with my own server [1].  I've had to make changes to
> > GLV-1.12556 in the past when the protocol changed, I can change it again.
> 
> How about waiting for a consensus to develop, *at the very least*?

  If I waited for consensus, Gemini would not be where it is today [1].
Also, it brought out a what I consider a bug in my code (generating links
from filenames) that it doesn't properly URL encode data [2].

> If the protocol were to change to allow IRIs, that's a *major breaking* 
> change that to me, as someone actually serving non-English content, is
> not only completely unnecessary but harmful.

  I don't expect that an IRI will be allowed for a request, but that an IRI
could be in a Gemini text file and it's up to the client to do the
conversion.  And it's that bit that I'm currently exploring.  

> 3. I'm still not convinced this would help anyone - IRIs still have
> reserved characters that have to be properly encoded - so completely 
> non-technical text/gemini authors will still have to rely on proper
> tooling.

  And we won't know until somebody tries.

  -spc

[1]	There's a reason why GLV-1.12556 and gemini.conman.org were the
	first Gemini server software and server in existance, becauxe I just
	went ahead and implemented it while solderpunk was still talking
	about it.  And I think the presense of GLV-1.12556 and
	gemini.conman.org sparked others to get busy.  And GLV-1.12556 was
	*NOT* following the specification at the time, as I disagreed with
	parts of the specification.

[2]	I don't have any non-ASCII file names, so it never crossed my mind
	to handle such things.  That is a blind spot as far as I'm
	concerned.