[gopher] Re: PyGopherd and Gopher+

[John Goerzen <jgoerzen@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, Jan 02, 2006 at 03:01:41AM -0600, Jeff wrote:
> On Sun, 01 Jan 2006 10:51:44 -0600, Benn Newman  
> <newmanbe@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 
> > On Sun, Jan 01, 2006 at 08:27:25AM -0600, Jeff wrote:
> >> Why don't we write a new spec which would supercede gopher+?
> > In the spirit of the original design *grin* we must form a commitee to  
> > solve a problem.
> 
> Let's do it then, if Mr. Goerzen approves.

Of course ;-)

> 1)  As I wrote in my previous post, I think that reserving new tabspaces  
> for information like mimetype and filesize would be a good start.  The  
> file's last-modified date would also be nice.

I think we're certainly moving in the right direction.

Let's think about a few other things.

 * MIME types and encodings are more complex than they may appear.

   Say you have a German text file encoded in UTF-8 and then gzipped.

   Some people would say this is an application/x-gzip file.  Others
   would say it's text/plain with a gzip encoding.

   But if you put the single file in a tar.gz file, some would say
   it's an application/x-tar file with gzip encoding, while others
   would say it's an application/x-gtar file, no encoding.

   You could take "people" to be "programs" as well.

   MIME types are handy because they are universal, but they are
   annoying because that are not understood universally.

 * It is still a great annoyance to have meta information conveyed
   by the referring object rather than the object itself.

   I wonder if we may consider extending the protocol so that a
   request of a certain form would cause a compliant server
   to send a single line of meta information before sending the
   document as usual.  This single line of meta information could
   even be in the form of a regular (gopher++ is it now?) menu line.

   It seems to generally be the case, both in filesystems and in
   browsers, that meta-information is obtained by the object itself,
   not the object the refers to it.  IE sometimes looks at the
   extension of a file to determine what sort of file it is, and this
   is generally considered a bug.

   By doing this, we could also reform the gopher:// URL schema.

-- John