[gopher] Re: Gopher thoughts

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ralph,

Thanks for your most intersting message.  I am glad to see someone
thinking in the future about what innovations could be achieved
through gopher!

Ralph Furmaniak <sugaku@xxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

> WYSIWYG is the enemy!  Basically, a professionally designed gopher
> should not on first glance appear much different from a recreational
> one.

I like that.  Of course, some people (myself included) could use some
help on nice organization.  I'm working on it, but hey, it's not there
yet!

> 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 manner, and is hence outdated in the age of graphical windowing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

I think of gopher as a global filesystem.  Let's imagine that someone
gets around to writing a gopherfs...

  *** shimmering and dreamy music ***

  cd /gopher/quux.org
  cat "About This Server"             # displays local file
  cd Software/Gopher
  ls -l                               # shows local and remote files
  cat "Intro.txt"                     # a file from floodgap.com
  cat "info.txt"                      # a file from quux.org

etc.  Nothing else can do this.  Not WebDAV, not FTP, not NFS.  It's
so cool to me -- I think of it as "mounting the planet."  I hope to
get some of the technical issues of writing a "gopherfs" module
resolved so this can actually become a reality.  Already we have
kio_gopher for KDE and a vfs module for Gnome (see earlier post in
this list) doing this sort of thing.  I haven't seen the Gnome module
yet.  KDE's shows a lot of promise but is unfortunately buggy.

> 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

So, I think that the beauty of gopher is network-transparency.  It's a
buzzword you hear a lot these days, referring to things like
databases, terminal servers, etc.  But gopher really *DOES* network
transparency.  If you use a browser like UMN gopher, which is probably
the closest we have to a real filesystem presentation, what you see is
essentially a large global filesystem.

From this, you get other benefits.  You get the straightforward uniform
presentation you like.  You get another thing you don't get in the Web
-- not only do you not know when you leave a site, but you don't care.

I've never actually used GopherVR or the "futuristic console" stuff,
so I'll skip commenting on those...

> 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).

I need to review Gopher+ some more and see just how extensible we can
make it.  It may be possible to add some gopher+ attributes.

> 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

It may not be as difficult as you think in some ways, and more
difficult in others.

You can use a tool like Pavuk to download entire sites.  UMN gopherd
can peek inside HTML files and use the <TITLE> for the menu entry.  So
there's most of your navigation.

The problem is links.  You can't just say <IMG SRC="foo.jpg"> in
gopherspace, because, for instance, if you're at:

gopher://foo.com/hindex.html

You'll get:

gopher://foo.com/hfoo.jpg

Which says it's a HTML file.

One very useful addition would be to communicate the type of a file
when it is requested rather than only in the directory.  However, this
would mean a fundamental and incompatible change to the protocol.

> 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

What a combination :-)

> 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>

Gopher would be a natural way to represent something like Slashdot, I
think.  In fact, you can probably find my musings on a Gopher-to-NNTP
gateway around somewhere, and the UMN source tree even includes an old
one written in Perl.

> 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

This is one of my favorite things to do -- surfing gopherspace.  It
seems that just "surfing the web" is not really possible anymore.  I
always use it for answering a particular question these days, not just
general curiosity.

> 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

Personally, I think we need a gopherd written in Python, and I aim to
do that one of these days.  (Really!)

UMN gopherd is probably the most full-featured we have at the moment.
It also has some various kinds of cruft in it.  Caveat emptor, I
guess.

>         "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.

Nice!

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

Technically, both are alive; however, there is much more traffic in
the list than on the newsgroup.

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

Thanks!

-- John