[gopher] ASK blocks in practice

[David Allen <s2mdalle@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hey guys, just wanted to throw out some questions.

Does anybody actually use ASK blocks in practice?  I've been playing
around with them under UMN gopherd, trying things out, but I don't
seem to be able to find any in the wild.  

One of the things that troubles me about them is that the program that
deals with the resulting ASK data has to know what format it's going
to be in before it starts, which limits the ability to use one program
to process multiple sets of ASK data.  The way UMN does it currently,
you have a file called "foobar.ask" and a file called "foobar".  The
file with the .ask extension contains a mockup of the questions you
want to ask.  Example:

Note: Here is a note to the user
Ask: What is your email address?
Choose: Are you:  M     F
AskL: Comments?

If I entered "foo@xxxxxxx", male, and my comments were (on two lines)
"foo bar" then the program would be passed this data:

foo@xxxxxxx
M
2
foo
bar

It seems to me that it would make more sense if the .ask file had a
field in it that associated a particular script with the handling of
the data reaped from the user.  This would allow multiple ask blocks
to point to one script without forcing you to make a symlink farm.

But at the same time, again you have to know the format of the data.
For example, when you encounter an AskL field, the server writes the
number of lines in the field, linebreak, then the actual data.  But
without knowing that there was an AskL field, your program has no way
of knowing that the "2" in the above example wasn't the answer to a
simple entry.

Do you guys think that ASK stuff is even worth the effort to extend?
What are the other options available?  Are any of you using ASK blocks
for anything?

-- 
David Allen
http://opop.nols.com/
----------------------------------------
There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over, 
but we want to do it over first.  Or something like that.
        -- Larry Wall, at ALS talking about perl6