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Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

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Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#51

Post by Aeolun »

spc476 wrote: post #41
astrobe_ wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did someone also pointed out that CRLF is a pointless Microsoftian archaism? There's no need anymore to use two characters to mark the end of a line.

Yes, several times. It was kept in because other text based protocols (like SMTP, HTTP) also specify the use of CRLF, at least for the request.

It also doesn’t really hurt anyone, though it would be nice if new protocols could try to remove the need from their specs.

We’re going to build new clients and servers anyway, so might as well handle just /n

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#52

Post by Aeolun »

naasking wrote: post #25

Gemini sounds neat. Not sure I'll continue playing with it, but from the spec I have a couple of suggestions you are free to implement or ignore. # Denial of Service Permitting zero or more whitespace characters in a request a introduces a denial of service because the request is no longer bounded. Just keep sending whitespace to keep the connection open. Mandating a single character closes this particular hole. It's…

I like your first suggestion, the rest don’t sound so great to me.

It’s simple now, let’s keep it like that.

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#53

Post by kitotik »

x3blah wrote: post #50
colinplamondon wrote: post #13

This is so intensely cool. Urbit was on its own island until recently - the only project challenging the domination of WWW. This + Tildeverse feels like the very, very, very early days of hackers starting to play with alternate protocols, and the style and format of WWW. It's fun, non-commercial, social, and aimed at hobbyists - just like the early WWW. Given another 10 years of experimentation, I could 100% imagine…

"Given another 10 years of experimentation, I could 100% imagine WWW being seen as corporate, commercial and professional space." Excerpt below is from the file /scripts/web included with the original netcat in 1995. #! /bin/sh ## The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand ## tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line ## clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP ha…

Whoa CurveCP looks super interesting.

Any resources you’d recommend beyond the main web site?

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#54

Post by visiblink »

azinman2 wrote: post #36
sloum wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my experience the gopher community is very split on this concept with many people doing just that, but many others (myself included) wishing that gopher/web proxies and cross posting did not exist at all.

Is there much (any) gopher community left?

There is! I read this on a gopher mirror of the Hacker News, so I thought I'd better come on over to the web version to respond...

In fact, several regular gopherites have commented on this thread.

Funny that this came up on the Hacker News on the weekend that the server is going down. Probably a good thing, since it only has 128MB of RAM.

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#55

Post by WoodenChair »

Aeolun wrote: post #51
spc476 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, several times. It was kept in because other text based protocols (like SMTP, HTTP) also specify the use of CRLF, at least for the request.

It also doesn’t really hurt anyone, though it would be nice if new protocols could try to remove the need from their specs. We’re going to build new clients and servers anyway, so might as well handle just /n

> It also doesn’t really hurt anyone

Well it does. Extra characters in the HTTP spec end up getting sent trillions of times per year over the Internet costing real money in bandwidth in aggregate.

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#56

Post by fancyfish »

x3blah wrote: post #50
colinplamondon wrote: post #13

This is so intensely cool. Urbit was on its own island until recently - the only project challenging the domination of WWW. This + Tildeverse feels like the very, very, very early days of hackers starting to play with alternate protocols, and the style and format of WWW. It's fun, non-commercial, social, and aimed at hobbyists - just like the early WWW. Given another 10 years of experimentation, I could 100% imagine…

"Given another 10 years of experimentation, I could 100% imagine WWW being seen as corporate, commercial and professional space." Excerpt below is from the file /scripts/web included with the original netcat in 1995. #! /bin/sh ## The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand ## tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line ## clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP ha…

For mobile users:

The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP handshake" want to run commerce over the damn thing. Ye godz. Welcome to TV of the next century -- six million channels of worthless shit to choose from, and about as much security as today's cable industry!

Having grown mightily tired of pain in the ass browsers, I decided to build the minimalist client. It doesn't handle POST, just GETs, but the majority of cgi forms handlers apparently ignore the method anyway.

A distinct advantage is that it doesn't pass on any other information to the server, like Referer: or info about your local machine such as Netscum tries to!

Since the first version, this has become the almost-minimalist client, but it saves a lot of typing now. And with netcat as its backend, it's totally the balls. Don't have netcat? Get it here in /src/hacks!

_H* 950824, updated 951009 et seq.

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#57

Post by brabel »

spc476 wrote: post #39
ReactiveJelly wrote: post #8

I see that they've specified both a transport protocol, to replace HTTPS, and a document format, to replace HTML. BLUF: They should have just run the text/gemini format on top of HTTPS 1.1, make a gemini --> HTML formatter, and maybe a restricted subset of HTTPS, and called it a day. Replacing HTTPS is a waste of time. Also, most of the benefits of the document format could be gotten with a sane subset of HTML. There…

With respect to the status codes, the original spec was worse (single digit response codes) than what exists now. I didn't agree with the original spec, so when I wrote my own Gemini server [1][2] I reused codes from HTTP. It was only after a drawn out discussion between myself and the original designer that a compromise was struck and we ended up with two digit response codes (and redirects---those weren't in the or…

I still don't see why Gemini couldn't use a small subset of HTTP itself. HTTP is really great, just a little too complicated with all the extra RFC adding stuff to it (cookies, CORS)... if you ignore all that and remove a few of the fancy things in HTTP/1.1 (as defined in RFC-7230), like content-negotiation, you get pretty much what Gemini wants, no?

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#58

Post by lal »

ReactiveJelly wrote: post #8

I see that they've specified both a transport protocol, to replace HTTPS, and a document format, to replace HTML. BLUF: They should have just run the text/gemini format on top of HTTPS 1.1, make a gemini --> HTML formatter, and maybe a restricted subset of HTTPS, and called it a day. Replacing HTTPS is a waste of time. Also, most of the benefits of the document format could be gotten with a sane subset of HTML. There…

Think of it more as a beefed-up Gopher than a pared-down web.

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#59

Post by micael_dias »

fancyfish wrote: post #56
x3blah wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Given another 10 years of experimentation, I could 100% imagine WWW being seen as corporate, commercial and professional space." Excerpt below is from the file /scripts/web included with the original netcat in 1995. #! /bin/sh ## The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand ## tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line ## clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP ha…

For mobile users: The web sucks. It is a mighty dismal kludge built out of a thousand tiny dismal kludges all band-aided together, and now these bottom-line clueless pinheads who never heard of "TCP handshake" want to run commerce over the damn thing. Ye godz. Welcome to TV of the next century -- six million channels of worthless shit to choose from, and about as much security as today's cable industry! Having grown…

Wish I had scrolled down first :D

Re: Gemini – A new, collaboratively designed internet protocol

#60

Post by qznc »

Aeolun wrote: post #49

OMG, this spec was so readable I actually read the entire thing for pleasure. I think this is a first.

I agree it is neat.

My experience tells me it is a sign of too much ambiguity and gaps that will bite you later though. See Markdown for example.

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