[gopher] Re: Gopherness

[Kyevan <kyevan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Interesting, but there are three things that I have reservations or 
questions about.

> - Putting "up" or "previous menu" items in menus which points into your 
> personal "data island".

Often times, pointing back up a tree makes sense, even if that's not the 
tree the user followed to get here. I think the issue is probably more 
with the title than the idea of putting a link to a menu 'above' this one.

> - Adding an Endless Array of New Item Types for Every New Thing that 
> Comes Along

The issue here is letting the client system (the entire computer system, 
I mean, not just the code that talks to gopher) distinguish between file 
types.

 > - Rendering Everything Else to a Handful of Established Types.

The problem here is that you're assuming all, for example, images are 
equal. JPEG works pretty well for photographs or 3d renders of lifelike 
scenes, but often makes drawings, charts, graphs, and the like unusable. 
This is the easiest to see, but even text has this issue - ASCII is 
incredibly simple and to be preferred for most English-language 
documents ("dumb" quotes over typographical ones, for example) On the 
other hand, what if you want to upload a text in the original language 
when that language wasn't English? Even most of the closely related 
languages have accents or the like, and then you go out to things like 
Japanese... you can see how this is a problem.

- Kyevan