[gopher] The road ahead

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am doing some thinking about cleaning up the gopher protocol and UMN 
gopher.

These ideas are all mixed in together...

* Removing \n.\n  -- see me other message on this topic.

* Overhaul of MIME support in gopherd/gopher.  This is already in 
progress.  When done, it will use standard mime.types and mailcap files 
rather than the viewext: stuff.  (Do I hear cheers rising from the 
audience? <g>)  Moreover, it will support an "encoding" file in the 
spirit of mime.types allowing the specification of things like gzip and 
bzip2-compressed files.  You can then configure per-type decoding (in a 
manner that works and is easy to setup) on the server side, or simply 
pass the information along as-is to the client.  There will then be a 
regexp-based MIMEtype-to-gopher0type converstion table... (ie, 
text/html -> h, text/.* -> 0, etc)

* Removal of the HTTP server code in UMN gopherd.  With the advent of 
gateways such as hurg that are more powerful, I think we can eliminate 
this.  (Does anybody use it?)

* Gopher+ thoughts.  Gopher+ has not been widely implemented.  It may be 
wise to rethink this protocol -- consider it a lesson learned, and think 
about obsoleting it.

* Removal of the "extra" type character from paths in UMN gopherd (in 
most cases).  I'm not quite sure what it's used for, but I think that 
with the combination of the removal of the \n.\n and new MIME code, it 
is needed less.

* A new protocol (Gopher++?) based on Gopher0.  As an example:

1Development Projects   /devel gopher.quux.org 70

hGOPHER TURNS 10 / GOPHER 3.0 RELEASED  /3.0.0.html    gopher.quux.org 70

0GOPHER TURNS 10 / GOPHER 3.0 RELEASED  /3.0.0.txt     gopher.quux.org 70

might change to:

Development Projects    gopher://gopher.quux.org:70/1/devel   
application/x-gopherdir en_US 4132

GOPHER TURNS 10 / GOPHER 3.0 RELEASED  
gopher://gopher.quux.org:70/h/3.0.0.html  text/html en_US 3951

GOPHER TURNS 10 / GOPHER 3.0 RELEASED  
gopher://gopher.quux.org:70/0/3.0.0.txt  text/plain en_US 2000

It might be nice to eliminate the typechar from Gopher URLs.  This may 
require some other protocol changes.

Let's brainstorm.

-- John