Re: TLS in Gopher
Greetings.
On Fri, 02 Mar 2018 06:46:01 +0100 Kim Holviala <kimholviala@fastmail.com> wrote:
> On 2 Mar 2018, at 6.34, Zachary Lee Andrews <zcrayfish@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > Just curious if anyone has considered using CAPS.TXT instead of adding more itemtypes or other weird stuff to signal that a server is TLS capable.
>
> Gophernicus does that, unforunately the live example server is gone because it's part of a huuuuuge drug bust :-D
>
> But that still doesn't solve the problem of how to add "TLS cabable" to the menu resources.
Adding such a flag or mark to menu items is just cosmetic. From the menu
you have no direct connection to the resource you are linking to. If
over time the resource/server changes the client will have to do probing
and handling of errors anyway. Here I am against adding incompatibili‐
ties for menu parsers.
My proposal states that you decide how you dig through gopher when you
start the client. Three modes are there, depending on how you like it:
* pure TLS – your client will stop/warn/ask you if there is some
resource which does not understand TLS/probing failed.
* try TLS – your client will probe for TLS, if not, it downgrades
* no TLS – old compatibility mode, client will not try TLS at all
It is up to you, the user, to decide, how you walk the gopher way.
Sincerely,
Christoph Lohmann
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