reiver, 7 months ago

@ruario @WildEnte

If you are interested in this type of thing — there is another small-net protocol I came across somewhat recently —

nex

https://nex.nightfall.city/nex/info/specification.txt

https://nex.nightfall.city/nex/info/station-guide.txt

nex is meant to be an alternative to the gemini-protocol, the gopher-protocol, and the Web.

#gemini #geminiProtocol #gopherProtocol #nex #nexProtocol #smallNet #smallWeb #smolNet #smallWeb

reiver, 9 months ago

The nex-protocol doesn't have anything like a Content-Type header (for declaring the type of a file).

It instead uses file-extensions (for declaring the type of a file).

...

See also:
https://mastodon.social/@reiver/108770165047632509

...

https://nex.nightfall.city/nex/info/specification.txt

https://nex.nightfall.city/nex/info/station-guide.txt

#nex #nexProtocol

reiver, 8 months ago

The nex-protocol specification doesn't describe a way of doing gzip, brotli, etc compression like HTTP does with the Accept-Encoding & Content-Encoding headers.

BUT —

A nex-server could support gzip compression when a ".gz" extension is added to the end of a file.

So if a client saw:

nex://example.com/path/to/file.txt

It could request:

nex://example.com/path/to/file.txt.gz

... to try to get a gzip'ed version.

Could do brotli, too:

nex://example.com/path/to/file.txt.br
#nex #nexProtocol

reiver, 8 months ago

The nex-protocol specification doesn't describe a way of doing content-type negotiation like HTTP does with the Accept & Content-Type headers.

BUT —

Since file types are given by file-extensions, a nex-client could just try different file-extensions.

For example, if a nex-client saw:

nex://example.com/path/to/file.txt

Then it could request:

nex://example.com/path/to/file.xhtml

nex://example.com/path/to/file.html

nex://example.com/path/to/file.md

Etc.

#nex #nexProtocol

reiver, 8 months ago

A nex-server could support something similar to piping (commonly found on Linux, Unix, DOS, etc) by chaining file-extensions.

I.e., something like:

nex://example.com/path/to/file.txt.stem.sort

nex://example.com/image.png.png2ansi.gz

#nex #nexProtocol

reiver, 8 months ago

I like the nex-protocol.

I wish it supported (as part of the protocol) imperative-verbs like HTTP has.

(For example, HTTP has the imperative-verbs — DELETE, GET, HEAD, PATCH, POST, PUT, PATCH, etc.)

(The finger-protocol also has imperative-verbs — although only one was defined in the specification — "/W")

#nex #nexProtocol

reiver, 8 months ago

One nice thing about the nex-protocol is —

The response is the actual file. You don't need to do any decoding. So it is simple.

One cost of this is —

In general, you cannot tell if you actually received the whole file or not. You don't know, for example, if the network connection died before you received the whole file.

#nex #nexProtocol