Comment by 🚀 stack
Re: "Without headers, there is no way to detect if document…"
Yes! TLS should've been optional. How many secret things are there on the Gemini network? How many lives would be ruined if someone bothered to forge a site?
It's like using a tank to take your date to the movies.
The only good thing about it is client certificates to keep track of game sessions.
4 hours ago
6 Later Comments ↓
🚀 lars_the_bear · 3 hours ago:
I think this situation can be improved, without losing what's best about Gemini.
I'm happy to work with other people who feel the same way. At the same time, I'm reluctant to cause divisions in what is already a small online community.
But if you just want Gemini without TLS, that's what Spartan is for, no?
☕️ tenno-seremel · 2 hours ago:
@stack ISPs already do MitM in some places. Nothing prevents them from inserting propaganda for their favorite führer of the day, even in Gemini.
Never heard about kepler://
thx much for this reference!
Spartan has an entirely different way to send data to the server
🚀 lars_the_bear · 50 minutes ago:
@stack : true, but it still lacks a way for the server to tell the client how much data to expect, so far as I can see. That's an odd omission, since there's a way for the _client_ to tell the _server_ how much to expect.
I guess the Spartan method is more a PUT than a GET. The advantage of the Gemini way is that you can bookmark a URL with the query string. That's true with HTTP GET as well. Perhaps a protocol should offer both approaches, at HTTP does? But if you start down that road...
@lars_the_bear: I see what you mean. Yes, transmitting the size ahead is really sensible -- you can allocate a buffer or check for available space ahead of time. I often question the rationality (or sobriety) of our founding father.
Original Post
Without headers, there is no way to detect if document exist: for example, zip archive is always downloading with 9 bytes of size. Yet another problem: even the protocol is Unicode oriented, URL-encoded links are unuseful. Madness! I need Gemini without TLS just.