Is streaming a normative protocol expectation? (was Re: Documents with mixed languages)

[Sean Conner]

It was thus said that the Great Luke Emmet once stated:
> 
> Yes there would be an ambiguity in the spec if streaming clients are 
> expected or normative. Personally I think it is intentional that the 
> spec aims to keep the complexity of implementation low, as that is in 
> keeping with the rest of Gemini's design approach. Implementing a 
> streaming client is more complex, and there are more cases that would 
> need to be specified to resolve protocol ambiguity. For example how does 
> a client tell the difference between a poorly behaved server that is 
> just dripping a few bytes out second by second and one that is a 
> streaming service? I can't see how it can, particularly given that there 
> are no content-length headers in Gemini.

  If you receive a MIME type of "audio/*", "video/*" or "text/event-stream"
[1], then you probably would want to stream the data or expect to spend
some time downloading the entire content (or abort entirely if you get
"text/event-stream"). 

  And there's nothing in the spec that precludes a client from dealing with
data in a streaming way (even *if* it may be more complicated).

  -spc

[1]	Yup, it's a thing.

	https://html.spec.whatwg.org/multipage/server-sent-events.html