On Tue, 7 Jan 2003, Beaker (aka Jeff W) wrote:

> Recently freeshell.org resurrected their gopherspace
> (gopher://gopher.freeshell.org) with the idea that not only would it
> help slow the protocol's demise, gopher's uniformity and "starkness"
> make it unappealing to the various commercial interests that some feel
> have monopolized the http protocol. I like gopher's intrinsic emphasis
> of content over presentation

I don't think the transport is at fault here.  Apart from more
sophisticated content headers which are supposed to aid the client
program, http itself isn't really that different than gopher.  There's no
reason why you can't map a hierarchical gopher-like structure to a web
site using little or no HTML and Apache's intrinsic directory listings.
Or even using anonymous ftp for that matter.

That's not to say that constraints aren't interesting to work with or
employ.  One can always use DJB's publicfile
http://cr.yp.to/publicfile.html to make things look spare and simple for
http and ftp. :)

> and am trying to think of useful and interesting ways I could add to the
> existing gopherspace (which is very small apparently); maybe a
> gopher://euglug.org ?

http://gofish.sourceforge.net/ is a currently maintained but as-yet
unaudited (AFAIK) gopherd.  Also works as an http server.  Its home is
gopher://seanm.ca/11/gofish

> BTW, the gopher protocol has some support in current browsers. By far
> the best appears to be Lynx and Mosaic. Sadly, gopher support is broken
> in Mozilla and its derivatives (except possibly Navigator), and
> non-existent in Dillo, Konqerour, and Links.

Mozilla 1.0 appears to have gopher support enough to work with gofish -
in what ways is its support broken? (okay, I just discovered the location
field doesn't properly update the URI, but besides that.)  Also, Opera
does not support gopher.

-po

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