[gopher] Re: Strategy: end of Gopher in Mozilla

["mdbird@xxxxxxxxxxx" <mdbird@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

I am not sure I am a typical Gopher user there may be no such thing but=20
I thought I would give my views on the future strategy.

I started using Gopher three years ago as a way of challenging=20
students on my Networking course who had their own web servers at home=20
and thought they knew everything about network servers.

Obviously Gopher is an exotic and certainly is not a preparation for=20
the future and I have been subject to snide comments from colleagues=20
about teaching outdated technologies.

But I cite two main reasons for persisting with Gopher servers.

On lower level courses I use GopherS on Windows XP as my Gopher=20
Server.
This introduces the students to the concept of services run by the=20
operating system and the notion of servers using different ports. Also=20
by using a range of client software from Lynx, Hgopher, WSgopher,=20
Firefox and even patched IE 6.
I can clearly demonstrate that how a client interaction with the same=20
server software can produce vastly differing results depending on the=20
features of the client software. The students are genuinely intrigued=20
to find out that there are other ways of serving web pages and=20
concealing a website within a Gopher server. This is where Firefox=20
stands head and shoulders above the other clients it is very capable=20
delivering a diverse range of file types from Gopher servers. Whereas=20
older clients just spew out HTML code from Gopher servers. For my=20
students a simple fully featured client that deals with web pages is a=20
must to gain their acceptance of Gopher. In the long term the community=20
must ensure that such clients will continue to be available to those=20
that will follow on after us. Lynx, Hgopher and WSgopher just don=E2=80=99t=
 cut=20
it as far as my students are concerned.

On higher level courses I use Bucktooth on Ubuntu Linux as my Gopher=20
Server.
This introduces students to the concept of daemons (inetd and xinetd)=20
TCP/IP services and wrappers. Bucktooth is a fine example of the power=20
of PERL and its installation scripts are an effective simple=20
demonstration of how PEARL scripts should work.

For me Gopher provides a different and interesting way of showing how=20
things really work rather than just using the safe sanitised offerings=20
of today, that make things so simple that students don=E2=80=99t fully=20
understand what they have achieved.

Regards

Mike Bird






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