Necom (Profile): (2025-09-01 10:19:04 (UTC)) [edited]

I was reading the wikipedia page for percent encoding recently, as it is used by a protocol called Spartan (https://portal.mozz.us/spartan/spartan.mozz.us/?) and I wanted to design a protocol similar to Spartan, but for Reticulum. A Spartan request contains the percent encoded path, and I was thinking, maybe it's not neccesary? Percent encoding is used in URLs to avoid using characters that can't be used or have some special meaning. URIs on reticulum don’t don’t seem to always follow the same structure and rules, an example would be

“8a48ceafcf3b8c3439643e8dbd15daf3:/page/test percTest”, which does load despite having a space in it. So perhaps to be more consistent with Reticulum protocols like nomadnet my protocol should not use percent encoding in URIs, and if it doesn’t do that then maybe it also shouldn’t use it in requests? Perhaps that doesn’t make sense, I mean the server does need to be able to separate the path from the other components in the request which can’t be done using spaces unless you use something like percent encoding. Of course I could use something like CRLF but I quite like the feeling of simply running “nc sld.tld 300” and then typing in a Spartan request, typing a CRLF would not be very easy. I do realise as I’m writing now that it would be difficult to type the command anyways since it would have to have the destination in it which is very long and would have to be copy pasted, much like CRLF. Also CRLF wouldn’t even have to be pasted since you could run something like “echo -n ’path\r\nsize’ | nc destination” (obviously this wouldn’t work since netcat wouldn’t understand a reticulum destination but you could replace it with some other program made for reticulum).

Also, what about ://? Other protocols use it to let a computer know what protocol it should follow, but with reticulum the computer would already know the protocol as the app name would be included in the announce. Then again you might come across a link to a destination you don’t have the announce for, although I suppose after requesting a path you would get the app name and then the computer could open whichever program should be used for that protocol. Still, you might want to signal to a person seeing the link what protocol it is, I’ve seen someone use gemini://destination for a gemini implementation over reticulum (see the post about alternatives to nomadnet), but I’ve also seen a lot of people use lxmf@destination

So perhaps we should start using nomadnet@destination, gemini@destination, and spartan@destination? (Well actually I was thinking of calling it Sumer instead of Spartan since it wouldn’t be identical to Spartan, so sumer@destination)