Hacker News Reader

If plaintext blogging fits your vibe and you’ve not yet heard of it, be sure to check out the gemini:// protocol.

An overview of the protocol, proxied from Gemini to HTTP, available here: https://geminiprotocol.net/

See also this review/critique from the cURL author, especially if you’re going to implement it yourself. Particularly around certificate handling and URL parsing, there’s a lot of underacknowleded complexity in Gemini.

https://daniel.haxx.se/blog/2023/05/28/the-gemini-protocol-s...

That's a really well written post. Thank you for sharing it, really makes you think about all the thought that has went into http and how important Chesterton's fence is

Yeah but also all of the legacy baggage that it comes with, y’know?

Like the URL parsing stuff for example. The issue is that they pull in one of these enormous old RFC’s and also say “but UTF-8” without any more explanation.

A better URL might be a good thing — scope it down to what’s in common use, design it tightly for your needs, etc. But if you’re gonna do that, do it! Rather than just pulling in an RFC with decades of baggage and then modifying it ad-hoc.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com