Rogallo v1.6.0 is now available. This release concentrates on the addition of a newly-supported protocol, and improving what can be displayed in the viewer and how it looks.

The headline change is the addition of support for the Spartan protocol. Having run into a couple of sites that either offered this as an alternative access method to their content, or the only access method, and noticing its vague similarity to Gemini (and also its reliance on Gemtext as the main hypertext language), it seemed like an obvious feature to add. So, having built a library to handle the low-level details, I got to adding support for this to Rogallo.

Showing the Spartan home page

Anyone using Rogallo should find that spartan:// URIs are handled in just the same way as gemini:// URIs are, so following them from within documents, or entering them into the command line all works. On top of this, Rogallo now supports Spartan's =: line type in documents served from a Spartan server. This means that this form of input is now supported.

Entering text to upload to a Spartan server

So, just to recap, at this point, Rogallo supports 4 different protocols.

I suspect this won't be the last of them, but I sense I'm close to adding the most useful ones.

The two other changes in this release are closely related. Rogallo has always handed off any MIME types that it can't directly handle, and the types it could handle were set to a very narrow collection -- Gemtext, Gopher maps and plain text, pretty much. With this release the list has been expanded to anything text/*. Working on the (pretty safe) assumption that any text/ MIME type can be displayed as text, this seemed like a sensible switch to make.

Working in conjunction with this, Rogallo will now also attempt to infer what kind of text is being shown, and apply some syntax highlighting where appropriate. So, for example, if you visit a text file that is Python code, it will be highlighted as Python code (if the server tells us that we're looking at Python code).

Viewing some Python code

One final change in this release is a small fix to Gopher support. Rogallo lets you configure a connection timeout value, but this wasn't being used for Gopher support. This is now fixed.