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

[Cameron Kaiser <spectre@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Mike,

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

If anything, your use in an academic setting is thoroughly typical (at least
I think for most of us who have a history with gopher). 

[...]
> But I cite two main reasons for persisting with Gopher servers.
> 
> On lower level courses I use GopherS on Windows XP as my Gopher 
> Server.
> This introduces the students to the concept of services run by the 
> operating system and the notion of servers using different ports. Also 
> by using a range of client software from Lynx, Hgopher, WSgopher, 
> Firefox and even patched IE 6.
> I can clearly demonstrate that how a client interaction with the same 
> server software can produce vastly differing results depending on the 
> features of the client software. The students are genuinely intrigued 
> to find out that there are other ways of serving web pages and 
> concealing a website within a Gopher server. This is where Firefox 
> stands head and shoulders above the other clients it is very capable 
> delivering a diverse range of file types from Gopher servers. Whereas 
> older clients just spew out HTML code from Gopher servers. For my 
> students a simple fully featured client that deals with web pages is a 
> must to gain their acceptance of Gopher. In the long term the community 
> must ensure that such clients will continue to be available to those 
> that will follow on after us. Lynx, Hgopher and WSgopher just don't cut 
> it as far as my students are concerned.

That's why I think we definitely need to reclaim Firefox, even though
we're getting kicked out. Your students are exactly the next generation
of gopher users that we need.

In addition, for teaching protocols, there's nothing much simpler. HTTP
is certainly getting heavier and heavier.

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

I appreciate the kind word. :)

> For me Gopher provides a different and interesting way of showing how 
> things really work rather than just using the safe sanitised offerings 
> of today, that make things so simple that students don't fully 
> understand what they have achieved.

It is excellent to hear that it still persists in the academic realm.

A progress report on the new Firefox plugin. I got a lot of work done on
it yesterday.

- SOCKS proxy support is now enabled, so that proxying does work. I'm still
not sure how to tunnel support under an HTTP proxy other than CONNECT, and
I think that's fraught with complexity, so I am not going to sweat that.

- A protocol handler is installed. This will be overbite:// for the initial
release to not stomp on internal gopher support, and once people have beaten
bugs out of it (there will be a public beta which I will release after
Firefox 3 has cleared the gate), it will then become gopher://.

- Item types h, g and I are fully supported, and the rest simply save to
disk (4569s etc.).

- Item type 0 is being reimplemented as a "horned" type (you'll see).

- A rudimentary item type 1 is working with hURL support.

- Item type 7 is coming as soon as I get more of itype 1 finished.

This is going along so fast I may have a "private alpha" for list members
by the end of this week. Please don't publicize this -- we don't want to give
Mozilla an excuse to pull us from 1.9. I won't release a public beta until
Firefox 3 final emerges.

-- 
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser@xxxxxxxxxxxx
-- They make a desert and call it peace. -- Tacitus ---------------------------