Posts tagged with "Spartan Protocol"

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.

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.

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

• Finger
• Gemini
• Gopher
• Spartan

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).

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.

Now that Rogallo supports multiple protocols, it's tempting to add one or two more. As of the time of writing, alongside Gemini, both Gopher and Finger are supported. While wandering the small web, I stumbled on the Spartan protocol. Given its similarity to Gemini and the fact it uses Gemtext as its main document type, adding it to Rogallo seemed like an obvious thing to do.

In aid of this, I've created Sybaritic. It is, in effect, a sibling library to Wasat, Port70 and Port79. As with the others, it is async-all-the-way and is designed to have a similar API.

With this in place, I can now extend Rogallo to handle spartan:// URIs as first-class citizens.

I've released a small update to Gemtext. At the moment, I'm working on adding Spartan protocol support to Rogallo, and to do this I need to handle a small extension it makes to Gemtext.

While Spartan is quite different from Gemini in the underlying protocol, it uses Gemtext as the default/standard markup language, but with one small difference. To allow uploaded data that is initiated by the markup, rather than by the server, there is a =: line type. In some respects, this is similar to type 7 items in Gopher maps.

Rather than spin up a whole new library just to support this one small difference, and rather than do some special-case nonsense in Rogallo itself, I've added optional (and turned on by default) support for =:. When encountered, this results in a SpartanPrompt object, which simply inherits from a Link.

Any code that doesn't require this feature can turn it off with the with_spartan_support parameter.