Protocol extensions in SpaceBeans
Posted Mon 03 Mar, 2025.
Yesterday I released version 1.4.3 that is available both the web and the Gemini space:
It was planned as a maintenance release, updating dependencies for bug fixes, but at the end I included a new feature: support for protocol extensions.
The two extensions that this version adds are as proposed here:
twin Gemini server protocol extension proposals
These extensions add optional parameters to successful Gemini responses, that according to the RFC 2045 are backwards compatible and should be ignored by clients that don't know what to do with them.
For example, if according to the spec a response could be:
20 text/gemini; charset=utf-8
And with the "size" extension enabled in the virtual host, we would get:
20 text/gemini; charset=utf-8; size=1234
Being "1234" the size of the response body.
I've implemented the two extensions suggested by the twins' proposal:
- Size: include the size in bytes of the response body when the request is successful.
- Cache: include a duration in seconds which a client should cache a resource. A cache duration of 0 or less means the client should not cache the resource.
Size should be very useful for clients, specially for large resources, because it could help improve the user experience by showing progress. It should be also possible asking for confirmation if a resource is very large (for example, SpaceBeans jar files are available via Gemini).
Cache could be useful for content that won't change often, for example RSS and Atom feeds. This could be used by feed readers, or by crawlers.
As far as I know, no client is supporting these extensions, and for now they are disabled by default. Check the documentation for further details:
Protocol extensions on the SpaceBeans README
This Gemini server is currently using the "size" extension!
Source