[gopher] Re: Item Type Suggestions

[nunojsilva@xxxxxxxxxx (Nuno J. Silva)]

Mate Nagy <k-zed@xxxxxxxxxx> writes:
<snip/>
>  About URLs: Someone has mentioned "relative links" in a previous mail -
> that was strange enough in itself, since there is no such thing in
> gopher. (Thus, it "cannot be broken"; and it especially cannot be broken
> in the server, which would put the mime bits in there itself, most
> probably after having generated the full selectors from all those
> relative links the content generator user supplied.)


An implementation of 'go up one level' command would be just eating
every char from the right side of the selector until a slash was
reached, and browsing that resource (which would be rendered as gopher
menu). (Although this might not work with some configuration, it would
work in lots of servers (right?))

We would have to add some sort of intelligence so when receiving an url
of this sort (the ones with the mime type), the client would just use
the part which is sent to server to get the 'one level above' url.

IIRC, the gopher protocol url has just one character for the data type,
the remaining of the url being used as the selector, when requesting the
data. Waiting for a parenthesis would break some servers, like sdf,
which uses selectors like 1/users for gopher://sdf-eu.org/11/users, and
expects '1/' to be sent (that being the expected procedure, rfc 1738
(and 4266 seems to state the same - gophertype is just one character)).

>  I would support a variation where we'd write off gopher+ as the
> complete failure it is, and just stick mime fields at the end of the
> menu records.


Gopher+ or mime-at-the-end-of-the-menu-entry have both the same problem,
when you have an url, it's not possible to say what's the document type.

A possible workaround: get the parent menu (using the same method I
mentioned before - I don't remember anything stating the selectors are
supposed to be built with a slash between each directory name, I need to
read the rfc again (even if gopher is supposed to be hierarchical, what
prevents some server from using dots instead of slashes for directory
separators?)), check the mime-type (for the mime-in-the-menu approach),
or check if the entry has gopher+ data (then retrieve such data).

<snip/>

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

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