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It's 12 Messidor, year 231.
Here's a short-form list of things I think would help Gemini as a technological ecosystem and as a community.
- Replace the URL specification with something more sane, either ASCII URIs as the web uses, unicode IRIs, or both. Something that makes sense.
- Strictly specify how proxy servers and clients of proxy servers should handle TLS certs.
- Replace the hostname-based TLS trust with authority-based trust (ie hostname + port).
Someone suggested we need an Acid Test for Gemini.
We actually used to have this, a couple years ago; it was a Python script someone wrote which contained a test harness for gemini servers. Unfortunately it was really anal, and oriented towards testing capsules and not server implementations, so there were a lot of tests which were focused on things unrelated to the software, such as TLS configuration. If I remember correctly there were also a bunch of tests for ambiguous parts of the 2020-era spec and turning off individual tests was really complicated.
I looked into writing a new test suite, likely in Common Lisp, a few months ago when working on galaxy-chat. I tabled the idea at the time, but I'm starting to think that an approach which is spec-focused rather than implementation- or interoperation-focused would be really useful, so maybe I should revive that project. If anyone other than me would find that practically useful (different from merely supporting the idea) I'd love to hear that.
In my opinion, every suggestion I have seen for additions to text/gemini in the last year have been kinda bad.
There might be room for cleverness in handling of fragments but that's specific to articles, not general to gemini, and in any case any pseudo-procotols based on the actual protocol should be organic based on what people actually do to solve actual problems, not designed by committee.
People propose adding preformatted tables to text/gemini every five months and I think the following post sums up my thoughts better than I could:
TLDR: Just make tables with the characters at your disposal and put them in a preformat block. No addition to text/gemini is needed, and any such addition would likely be harmful.
These are suggestions for people who have energy and desire to act on suggestions. None of the above suggestions are necessary for Gemini to continue being awesome... and it is awesome, trust me. I expressed this feeling more long-form in this post:
—slondr
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