Uploading content over gemini

[Philip Linde]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2021 23:03:02 -0500
Alex <alex at alexwennerberg.com> wrote:

> While both of these are technically feasible, they are a bit wonky, and for large files would involve many requests. What I’m wondering is whether these are ideas worth considering — ways to upload files without extending or replacing Gemini. Any thoughts?

Hi Alex,
I think it's fine if Gemini remains a tool primarily to download and
display text and other files. As such, there is no need to "replace"
Gemini because it's out of scope of the protocol. That said, and I've
think I've actually seen an example of this before, within the current
spec you could implement a line oriented editor, in the style of ed(1)
using 1x status responses. Documents could then not just be uploaded,
but authored directly within Gemini.

A sufficiently smart client™ could format a local document as a
sequence of inputs to such a line based editor. For that kind of use it
doesn't need to be complex. Just a way to open an editing session, a
way to open a new line, a way to append to the current line and a way
to terminate the editing session. E.g.

c: gemini://example.com/document/edit
s: 3x to gemini://example.com/document/edit/session/afdef947f9
s: Repeated 1x responses until terminated or session timeout

oHello! this is the first line, opened with "o"
+ and this is its continuation, added with "+"
oThis is the next line.
oThe next input after this terminates the session, with ".":
.

This will of course generate many requests, but at the cost of sensible
human use you could allow escape codes to indicate line feeding, so you
could use all the space allowed in a request

Another idea is to use email. Blog-by-email if you will, or
comment-by-email could be implemented as an automatic process. But
running an email server may not be a walk in the park. This seems more
sensible to me, but I'm not looking to run my own mailserver. Maybe a
tool could regularly connect to an existing IMAP server and work with
that.

-- 
Philip