Re: Hey Geminispace

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From: meff <email@example.com>

Subject: Re: Hey Geminispace

Date: Wed, 25 May 2022 19:21:14 +0000

Message-ID: <a6c2mi-iehc1.ln1@meff.me>

On 2022-05-25, D Finnigan <dog_cow@macgui.com> wrote:

meff wrote:

>

> That said, NNTP is pretty crufty as a protocol. It has both

> stateful and stateless bits. The existing clients all speak variations

> of the RFC. SMTP has pretty similar problems, from what I can tell. It

> doesn't have a concept of hierarchy the way NNTP (loosely) does.

What I noticed recently is that many Internet application protocols are

fundamentally file transfer protocols: I have a file on my machine, and I

want to store or access it on another machine.

NNTP

HTTP

SMTP

POP

IMAP

FTP (obviously)

Gemini

Gopher

.... and others are all fundamentally file transfer

This is a good observation 🙂. File transfer protocols were some of

the earliest forms of RPC. Some of the original RPCs were developed as

OTT Modem protocols, like XMODEM and its descendants.

One of the reasons I like HTTP so much as a protocol is that it's

fundamentally stateless, which means it's basically a light layer of

human-readable ASCII framing atop arbitrary data. HTTP of course has

its warts. All I'd ever want from a network protocol is a bit of

framing around a bag of bytes. Something that gives me more

descriptive capabilities than the header of a single packet, and lets

me tie multiple packets together to a coherent "action". It's why I

hate protocols like SIP (and RTSP to some extent) which try to be very

opinionated on sending data.

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