[gopher] Gopher thoughts

[Ralph Furmaniak <sugaku@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Before I begin, I would first like to explain what I personally want for
gopher to become.  The reason that I will post my stuff on Gopher and
not HTTP+HTML (once I fix up some stuff with our router/firewall, and
once I actually get some stuff worth posting) is because I do not want
to waste any time troubling myself with the layout and colours, only to
make the reader trouble themselves with sorting through the layout and
colours.  Thus all of my ideas are geared towards having a gopher that
can do all sorts of cool stuff and be customizable, without requiring
the publisher to spend time with the formatting and layout.  To me,
WYSIWYG is the enemy!  Basically, a professionally designed gopher
should not on first glance appear much different from a recreational
one.

Now that I have established that I am lazy, let us proceed.  Some of
these ideas may be ahead of their time, but its good to plan ahead, if
for no other reason than to base SF books around.  You do not have to
agree, hence lies the value of mailing lists; I am not even sure if I
agree with myself about certain points.  There are things that I
probably have forgotten to say, but this message is already long enough
and I have written things that I perhaps shouldn't.

Many people think of gopher as a way to send text files in a text
manner, and is hence outdated in the age of graphical windowing
systems.  My idea for this would be the introduction of "themed
clients".  Basically, the beauty of Gopher lies in its straightforward
uniform presentation, but (for the uncouth masses who do not appreciate
such beauty <g>) once this data is sent, it does not have to remain like
this; it can be formatted and displayed by the client as the user
wishes.  We already see a bit of this with Konqueror's and Mozilla's
treed lists (though I am not particularly fond of Konqueror's for its
treatment of i-lines) .  Note that this still upholds my principles as
the publisher does not have to worry about this, and the client is still
provided with a clear and uniform layout that they enjoy.  This does not
really have to be more than a skin (and perhaps some colours), and IMHO
should retain the fixed-width fonts.  I see one of those futuristic
console skins, with a part in the centre which displays the directories
in simple unisized text characters, in perhaps a colour to go better
with the background.  For most of us, standard display is great and
pristine, but I wouldn't mind introducing some of these elements to my
gophering.

It may seem that what we need is some real innovation, such an option is
GopherVR and, although I was unable to install it, it seems like it
could theoretically be the ideal UI.  It is possible to present the
menus in such a way that they can be as quickly and efficiently accessed
as standard text menus.  One can perhaps also more effectively group
like items, and "pile" together different views of an item (especially
different translations), as mentioned in the paper about this subject
from the1995 Gopher Conference.  For some computers, it does not even
have to be pure-3d, but just a panorama view would suffice.  One gripe I
have with the current implementation is the whole need of specifying
position, scale, orientation,... of objects if you want them placed in a
certain way.  I am also unsure about the qualities of the ability to
import your own objects.  I guess this could be good for ambience, but I
think should not replace the default object markers, though skins for
the markers could be fine.  One the client side, once oculd also choose
between an efficient straight-forward layout, or one with nice animated
transitions.

Before we treat the issue of positioning items, I would like to diverge
a bit.  Something that I think is a great example of what I said, is
LaTeX.  LaTeX was made for this very purpose, and using it you can
generate professional looking papers just be marking what is an
item/chapter/math/etc and letting the program take care of layout.  I am
a bit undecided on the issue, but it could be helpful to introduce some
of these basic elements into gopher.  By this I mean, one would have the
ability to organize the list into grouped items and perhaps even
generate headers.  This would certainly improve the grouping
functionality on GopherVR, and not require you to organize the items
into a ring manually using position and orientation.  It should of
course be done so that if you removed all of these extras you are still
left with a well organized page (anyone who has used Lynx on standard
web pages may attest to how disorganized the flow becomes upon removal
of tables and other such things).

This is indeed far ahead of the times, and would serve as little more
than novelty eye-candy, but it would be interesting to have models for
the people, and then people in the same directory could see each other,
perhaps by providing the information in an 'avatar' file in that
directory (which could just be a script/mole).  Yet this of course
serves little purpose, although it would be fun to have games of tag
through quux's directories :-)

Something else that I would like to see is the conversion of some
http+html pages into gophers.  This is of course more difficult then the
reverse transition as then you just add formatting and icons, while here
you literally add order to the chaos.  I am not really sure what this
will acheive, but I am both stubborn and insane.  As a test case I might
contact Marteen van Gelder and ask to do this to origami.kvi.nl, which
is already almost in gopher format.  By this I mean that there are
subdirectories, and accessing each one gives some text and (basically) a
list of items in that directory, one per line.  In fact, practically the
only time there is more than one link to a line is when it offers
multiple formats for the diagrams, and this is one of the specialties of
gopher+.  This should not be too difficult to implement with "lynx
-crawl -traversal" and some perl, which is my specialty.  Another
interesting venture could be to translate mathworld.wolfram.com,
although I am not sure why.  Perhaps even Slashdot lite could be made
into a gopher <g>

Today I said to my friend that gopher could be making a comeback.  He
laughed at this idea thinking that I was perhaps joking (I do that a
lot) as gopher is a way to send text files, and saying how people like
the glitz of the web.  I am not saying that gopher is to overtake the
web, we are just working to make something that is good for what it was
designed for: transfer of information.  No matter how far gopher goes,
the web will always have a place in supplying cool sites, animations,
e-business, etc.  And this is the way it should be since though we would
like some new content in gopherspace, we want good content from people
who wish to post meaningful.  Once we wish to invite people in, it would
probably be best to ask them to download a gopher client.  IE is not too
good, and (as far as I have heard) Netscape 6 does not gopher it.  The
gateways could be used at first, but I do not see how different this is
then asking people to install shockwave, flash, acrobat reader, or the
rest of the gamut.

I myself was quite skeptical when I heard of gopher, but when I finally
saw a gopher, I realized that this is great.  I won't kid anybody, I
just started with gopher a few days prior, yet I have read most of this
list, the protocols, and other miscellania.  I started on quux and
though there were always sites, this was the first I found really well
accessible good information.  I started browsing the archives and began
to read about Josephus, "America that can say yes", and other topics
that I would not have looked for on the web because there is just too
much.  I was also a bit surprised to find a really good file about
Aikido, which would normally have been lost in the crowds of the web.  I
have installed both UMN gopherd and bucktooth without any problems
(contrary to the warnings in the bucktooth docs).  So far I prefer
bucktooth, especially liking its 'gophermap' configuration, despite its
lack of gopher+ support.  And it is in perl, which is just groovy.  As I
have seen several comments about problems with gopherd, which of these
servers do people think should be focused on?  I am now trying to figure
out what gave me the idea to try Gopher.  According to Netscape history,
I first searched for gopher three days ago after reading some of byron's
poetry.  I do not expect those to be related much.

To end this message (which has already grown longer than expected) on a
lighter note,  I got to reading "The Whole Internet" which was basically
the first internet book.  When I got to the chapter on Gopher, it also
mentioned the "Web" and said that:
        "Admittedly, Web servers and hypertext editors are scarce; but
the potential here makes the World-Wide Web one of the most interesting
new tools on the Internet."
Oh how the tables have turned.

PS: has this list replaced comp.infosystems.gopher?

Enough of this, I am pressing send; no turning back now!