Re: Gopher over TLS

On 06/12/2021 09:37, Sean Conner wrote:
>> I hear about this gopher/TLS abomination since many years now. Haven't
>> those TLS-people figured out a non-intrusive way to do their thing by
>> now without bothering standard-gopher-people? ie. some DNS SRV record,
>> or special URL marking, or CAPS capability, or custom port, or something
>> else?
> 
>    It's not that easy---I wrote about this a few years ago [1] and relatively
> recently [2], which briefly goes into how I think people expect this to
> work.
> [1]	http://boston.conman.org/2019/03/31.1

I wasn't trying to make it sound easy. My point was that pretty much 
anything would be better than hammering a plain gopher server with 
stupid TLS requests that can only fail.

I am not at all interested in gopher over TLS, I consider it as a 
blasphemy. One of the things I like about gopher is its simplicity, 
openness and transparency. But that's me. I can understand that other 
people may have other things that make them "tick". That being said, if 
*I* was interested in gopher-over-TLS, I'd consider two possible scenarios:

1. using a DNS SRV record to tell "this host supports gopher-over-TLS on 
port xxx"

2. advertising TLS through CAPS. First, a gopher client fetches the CAPS 
(over plain text), and then it may switch to TLS queries if it sees TLS 
being okay'ed in CAPS.

Both of these solutions need no protocol change (incl. no change in 
gophermaps).

In your blog post you do not address any of these two approaches. But 
again - I don't care really, other than wishing not to be annoyed by 
TLS-people abusing the standard.

Mateusz