[gopher] Re: Item Type Suggestions

[Cameron Kaiser <spectre@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > I am really against anything besides true text files being classified under
> > 0.  Neither DOC nor RTF files are text files and would break all existing
> > gopher clients.
>  fully agree
> > I much prefer putting almost everything under 9, just because older
> > clients will do something that is very acceptable - it will download
> > and store the file as a binary, which any viewer an handle.
>  also fully agree.
>  Binary files (doc, mp3, rtf, what have you) are binary files. Let the
> user handle them. IMHO, even building in movie playing support or any
> other sophisticated file type discovery into a gopher client is
> overdoing it (except for image types, which is often handled by image
> loading libs).
>  Let's keep the ease of implementation of clients in mind (that's one
> (or *the*) massive advantage of the gopher protocol).

The reason I was suggesting in my other post to have item types for these 
newer types is not to make the client handle them, but to let the client
know what it is so it can launch a handler. In Overbite's case that could
even be the browser itself, but for a simple gopher-only client, at least it
could pick from the most appropriate external handlers instead of guessing.

Plus, most old clients when they see an unfamiliar item type usually fail
gracefully and handle it as 9.

Particularly for XML, CSS and RSS which may be hosted on a gopher server, 
using 0 for these despite being text/* could quite possibly be seen always
as text/plain and not further interpreted by an external viewer, which is
probably not what we want.

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  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser@xxxxxxxxxxxx
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