Rethinking the link line

[The Gnuserland]

Dear Geminauts,

I am pretty aware the specs are somehow frozen, but I entered in the 
Gemini space about six month hence I missed a lot of its evolution. Even 
though I have not been very prolific in terms of pages made on my 
capsule, basically for lack of time, I work and use it every day since 
the day I started.

I hope you will give even for the late comers the opportunity to express 
their opinions!

The daily use of Gemini, since being both author and reader, let me 
consider that it would be useful create an alternative flavor of the 
gemtext => link.

I think that adding a secondary behavior will increase the ability for 
both author and reader to have more control on the way the content is 
delivered and accepted, also this idea looks toward the future where 
possibly more GUI client will be available.

Today the specs define:

=>

to provide links for every protocols your client and the capsule server 
can handle, if for instance you client is able to handle some of the 
content delivered it will be likely to be display in a line.

I suggest to also to add a second flavor:

<=

This flavor forbids any suitable content to be displayed in line even if 
the client is capable and should not used to provide link to GMI files.

For TUI clients serving <= and => is most likely the same even though 
with software like DucklingProxy you may open an http page on your 
client, but with <= you could not.

For a GUI client it would allow the author (even though Gemini is more 
for the reader) to decide how delivering certain content, for instance 
an author may decide to deliver a big and weight image with <= and 
triggering the internal download feature separately from the rendering 
of the page. Reader may decide that every media content that is 
delivered through <= to be saved in a /tmp like folder or even disable 
(if the client allows it) to hide any <= line for security.

To close, the point is with two flavors and two different behaviors 
authors and users will have more control over the content and over the 
client, as well a more predictable way to understand how a link line 
will work. However simple clients and TUI clients can still ignore <= 
and serve everything as =>; basically I think adding a second flavor 
doesn't break Gemini protocol and doesn't add more complexity.

Thanks for reading,

TGL