Not always online capsules

[Stephane Bortzmeyer]

On Tue, Sep 21, 2021 at 09:41:44AM +0100,
 Alice <lia at loveisanalogue.info> wrote 
 a message of 39 lines which said:

> Are there any protocols that could be used with (say) Gemini for
> capsules that are not always online ?

That could be interesting for some low-tech environments such as
servers powerd by solar energy (whch is not almways available)
<https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/about.html>.

> The expectation that the whole internet is always online feels like
> a massive waste of resource.

I agree. Some protocols (UUCP, DTN, etc) are designed for intermittent
connectivity. (For DTN, start with RFC 4838
<gemini://gemini.bortzmeyer.org/rfc-mirror/rfc4838.txt> then RFC 5050
and 5325.)

> It should be ok for a capsule to say "hey, I'm not online. Come back
> later, or check this mirror". Instead we get fatal looking errors.

In the lively discussion in this thread about machine-readable
vs. human-readable text, nobody mentioned the serious issue of
internationalization. Not everyone reads english.

> Maybe custom TXT DNS entries could specify when to expect the
> capsule to be available, and where to find mirrors ?

Since unavailability of the capsule may not be known in advance (such
as with the example of a solar-powered capsule), DNS, with its caches,
may not be the best solution.