[gopher] Re: meta: item types, etc.

[Roman Pavlov <webmaster@xxxxxxxxxx>]

By the way, I noticed that UMN gopherd uses P itemtype for PDF (but 9 in 
the selector string). Here is string it sends on my machine:

Pipasam-x       9/ipasam-x.pdf  dell.home       7070    +

Lynx parses it to:

gopher://dell.home:7070/P9/ipasam-x.pdf


Cameron Kaiser wrote:
>> Maybe just using gopher+ VIEWS feature would help? Implementing just a 
>> subset of gopher+ in clients and servers shouldn't be very hard and 
>> wouldn't probably cause much protest from gopher+ critics.
> 
> No, I agree that ultimately the fact that gopher+ uses MIME will solve the
> problem. However, there will still be people using the earlier protocol, so
> there still needs to be some mechanism to formally define a new itemtype.
> 
> To wit, the item types in question were over text/xml and text/css. I'm
> thinking designating them as x and c, but I don't want to do such things
> unilaterally unless I absolutely have to; while I already did that with p
> and d and that seems to have been okay, sooner or later there will be a
> clash.
> 
> Right now, the type list I work off of looks like this:
> 
> 0-9  the usual suspects
> s sound file (wide type -- handled internally as application/octet-stream)
> ; movie file (don't ask me, this is something I've seen used historically;
>       wide type)
> h HTML
> g GIF
> p PNG
> d PDF
> I generic image
> T 3270
> i info
> 
> My proposal is:
> 
> - avoid typographical characters due to URL encoding problems, with ; as
>   the sole historically tolerated exception (deprecated but supported)
> - 0-9 are well-defined and atomic and don't change
> - a-z represent specific MIME types for document classes (s being exception)
>   such as PDFs, images, RTF, HTML, XML, etc.
> 
>   immediate changes:
>   j JPEG
>   t TIFF
>   b BMP
>   r RTF
>   x XML
>   c CSS
>   f favicon
>   k XBM (eKs Bee Em)
> 
>   s deprecated but supported
> 
> - A-S represent specific MIME types for media or interactive classes such as
>   WAV, AIFF, AAC, MP3, MOV, AVI, OGG, etc. (I being exception)
> 
>   Since many of these share the first character, reserve mnemonic types for
>   free or common codecs such as MP3 or OGG.
> 
>   immediate changes:
>   O OGG
>   H tHeora (sorry)
>   M MP3
>   A AVI
>   S WAV
>   Q QuickTime MOV
> 
>   I deprecated but supported
>   
> - T remains 3270
> - U-Z reserved for application specific internal handlers and can be used
>   freely with client-defined behaviour for internal URLs (such as using a U
>   item type to run a different client handler, etc.)
>