[gopher] Re: Gopherness

["Nuno J. Silva" <nunojsilva@xxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, 20 Jul 2008 17:15:48 -0500
Kyevan <kyevan@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Interesting, but there are three things that I have reservations or=20
> questions about.
>=20
> > - Putting "up" or "previous menu" items in menus which points into
> > your personal "data island".
>=20
> 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.

I would place such a feature in the gopher client itself, something
like 'goto parent menu' and 'goto server root'.

<snip/>=20
>  > - Rendering Everything Else to a Handful of Established Types.
>=20
> The problem here is that you're assuming all, for example, images are=20
> 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

You can always set the jpeg quality to 100% when creating the file
(I don't know how much tools allow you to do that - at least the GIMP
and ImageMagick do it), but it might be useful to allow another image
type, for the examples you described. Although gif is associated with
'g', i'd pick png, as the former is proprietary. (How is that issue? Is
there still any 'active' patent on the mechanisms used to create gif
pictures? I remember reading somewhere that png was better than gif,
but if those patent issues are over, we could just keep gif.)

> 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.

There's utf8. But, when dealing with english texts, keeping them to
ASCII is, IMO, the best choice (unless it's some sort of scientific
text where using the greek letters themselves instead of using their
names is more readable (and it is not possible to use ASCII characters
instead)).

--=20
Nuno J. Silva (aka njsg)
LEIC student at Instituto Superior T=C3=A9cnico
Lisbon, Portugal
Homepage: http://njsg.no.sapo.pt/
Gopherspace: gopher://sdf-eu.org/11/users/njsg
Registered Linux User #402207 - http://counter.li.org

-=3D-=3D-
``Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes.''
 -- Oscar Wilde