a space case for transparent gemtext compression

[Francis Siefken]

Hi ew, thanks for coming up with an interesting alternative:

* writing an article (arbitrary size, consider it big for the
>   argument)
>   => filename.gmi
> * compressing this file with xz, say
>   => filename.gmi.xz
> * adding an abstract which describes the article
>   => filename-abstract.gmi
> * adding a link to the abstract
>   => filename.gmi.xz  read more [compressed]
> * the abstract is added to your feed and/or index.gmi
>

But in this flow there is additional user choice involved to 'read more'.
It's similar to gopher, the text is plain text, anything else such as
compressed text is designated as a binary file.
In my personal preference as a gemini reader, if it's basically just a page
or a few pages of text I'd like to read it all immediately.
Perhaps it's a habit from the www. But it's similar to teletext, when I
choose a number I expect to see the complete teletext page, even though
teletext is just a few lines (which won't really benefit from compression
even in 300 baud situations).


> The client software might be able to uncompress the downloaded
> file and display it similar to LaGrange displaying image as if
> they were "inline".
>

I just tried it, amfora asks me to open or download the
xicygnus.gmi.gz file.
I choose open; the os recognizes the *.gz extension and loads the default
decompression extraction app.
In this extraction app I have to manually press extract, choose an
extraction location and when it's extracted I can opt to open the file
location and then double click the gmi file which it opens in a plain text
editor, not in amfora.
That's not 'keep it simple'. While it's possible that one day there's a
gemini browser which recognizes the gmi.gz and automatically decompresses
it, this is't working now - and why would it? In firefox and chrome it's
the same behaviour unless one would write a javascript that would handle it
automatically - but that doesn't fly in gemini space.
Alternatively one could reconfigure it client side to automatically
decompress and display client side, with the back button or key working -
but this you cannot enforce as the one serving the gemini capsule.

regards,
Francis (NL)
gmni://fsiefken.srht.page
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <https://lists.orbitalfox.eu/archives/gemini/attachments/20210617/b85ff126/attachment.htm>