GopherProxy

2019-06-25 - No one to relate to 'cept the sea
----------------------------------------------

Solderpunk continues his exploration of project gemini [1]. I had
reached out to him on the fediverse, and he kindly responded in
full, so when he did likewise, I felt like I just had to do the
same.

First of all, and probably most importantly, I want to reach out to
Sean [2] who writes somewhat despairingly of the "geminimap" link
format I proposed. He, well, he doesn't like it [3], referring to
it as an "abomination". I don't think it's quite that bad, but I do
acknowledge that there are some issues.

I made my case here that using <tab> as a delimiter has serious
disadvantages. While it is true, as Sean says, that every keyboard
has a <tab> key, the fact remains that modern computers and
programs interpret that key differently. I think the disadvantages
of it outweight the immediate advantage of having a dedicated key -
particularly when we consider the initial ideas behind Gemini.

I think solderpunk has given more than enough commentary about
escape-chars and the rest, so I won't go into it here, except to
say that no matter what delimiter you come up with, there's always
going to be some plausible reason to use that delimiter in a
file/uri. No matter what you do, you may have to end up escaping a
character!

In a conversation on the Fediverse [4], tomasino, alex and others
weigh in on solderpunks last idea: Magic! Well, at least magic
strings.

I have to say that I love this idea, in fact I'd be far happier
with it than my own idea. I fear that I was allowing my ideas to be
constrained by limits imposed by gopher, and the implementations of
that. Thinking inside the box, as it were.

In terms of magic strings, of the options proposed, the one I like
best is:-

=>

This just reminds me of when I was a kid, playing with the terminal
at home. Its like being brought full circle back to those days. Of
the others, I fear that the monkeyloop is just overused these days,
and I don't think a shebang should be used for anything other than
its accepted usage.

Finally, and happily, I think the idea of slowing down is a good
one. There's no rush here, there's no pressure, this is all just
fun, and it should remain that before anything else.

[1]: gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemini/gemini-maps-3.txt
[2]: gopher://conman.org
[3]: gemini://gemini.conman.org
[4]: https://glitch.social/users/gcupc/statuses/102326434899616117

FN: Bonus prize to anyone who gets the reference in the header.