[gopher] Re: Gopher "robots.txt"

[David Allen <s2mdalle@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Jan 14, 2001 at 09:32:45PM -0800, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
> > It wouldn't be that much of a performance hit.  Rather than fetching the
> > directory with a normal gopher request, then fetching the attributes for
> > each entry of the directory, the robot could make a request something
> > like this:
> > 
> >     1/directoryF$+VIEWS+ABSTRACT+ROBOTS

<snip>

> 
> This is a excellent idea, but I don't think we want to require all robots or
> robot-like things to be gopher+ compliant. It would be nice, but I don't
> think it should be mandatory.

Well if you're going to staple something new onto gopher, it makes
sense to do it in gopher+, rathern than modifiying the original gopher
with additions to it rather than gopher+, since after all gopher+ was
just a set of modifications to gopher. :)

> Also, this doesn't solve the problem adequately for those *servers* which are
> not gopher+ compliant, or certain subsets of indexed search servers that can't
> or don't make gopher+ compliant responses (I can think of several 
> immediately).

Hm.  Well, I can agree with this, but at the same time, what is to
become of gopher+?  You can either merge it with the original gopher
and say "this is what gopher is, and we'll write software
accordingly", or you can throw out gopher+ and stick only with gopher,
but having gopher+ sitting around as something that might be supported
and might not be seems like a pain.  Gopher+ has some decent
abilities, and I don't see why you shouldn't use them in this
situation.  So maybe we should be asking if gopher+ is something that
should continue to be sometimes-supported, or if it should be taken in
or thrown out.

-- 
David Allen
http://opop.nols.com/
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