Should Gemini clients alert users upon redirect?

[Michael Lazar]

On Wed, Feb 17, 2021 at 4:18 AM Stephane Bortzmeyer
<stephane at sources.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Feb 16, 2021 at 10:52:47PM -0500,
> Michael Lazar <lazar.michael22 at gmail.com> wrote
> a message of 33 lines which said:
>
> > gemini://example.com and gemini://example.com/ are canonically the
> > same resource and should always return the same response.
>
> Are you sure?
>
> RFC 3986, section 6.2.3 says "In general, a URI that uses the generic
> syntax for authority with an empty path should be normalized to a path
> of "/"." Note the "in general". The rest of section 6.2.3 explains
> that is is scheme-specific.
>
> <gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space/docs/specification.gmi> seems
> silent about "gemini:" rules. 1.2 says "The path, query and fragment
> components are allowed and have no special meanings beyond those
> defined by the generic syntax."
>
> (The Lupa crawler currently normalizes <gemini://example.com> to
> <gemini://example.com/> but I wonder if I'm right.)

That's an interesting point. Assuming the gemini spec is undefined
simply because this edge case was not considered at the time (that I
am 99.9% sure of). Can you make an argument for why this
normalization *should not* be adopted by gemini://?

The biggest advantage that I see is that we can use existing URL
normalization tools and libraries which, like it or not, are heavily
biased towards working with the http:// URL scheme.

Also, those URLs being the same means that I can always depend on
using "/" as the relative link for my root URL. If I had to worry
about them being semantically different, I would also want to be able
to use an empty string "" as a relative URL (which is valid as far as
I can tell, see path-empty in section 4.2 the RFC). But looking at the
text/gemini specification for link lines:

=>[<whitespace>]<URL>[<whitespace><USER-FRIENDLY LINK NAME>]

A blank, relative <URL> will collapse into

=>[<whitespace><USER-FRIENDLY LINK NAME>]

which collides with the alternate form of

=>[<whitespace>]<URL>

- Michael