[gopher] Re: Gopherness

["Hugh Guiney" <hugh.guiney@xxxxxxxxx>]

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 12:01 PM, Nuno J. Silva <nunojsilva@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> 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.)

Although GIFs were "proprietary" at one time (it was actually only the
compression scheme used in GIF, LZW, which Unisys owned and was
licensing... for software implementations; not to individual GIF
files, despite popular ideas to the contrary), the patent has been
expired since 2003 and are now completely free.

PNG was developed as a replacement to GIF in light of the controversy,
but there are still technical reasons to use it over GIF, such as
Alpha transparency (treated as an addition to the standard RGB
channels rather than as an special color that is either on or off),
better compression, and support for more than 256 colors.

I know this is probably more information than any gopher-wrangler
needs to know, but as a graphic artist/Web developer I thought I'd
chime in. :)

> 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)).

I'd actually love to see UTF-8 implemented in Gopher; has this been
done before? ASCII may have been the standard back when the original
spec was written, but it seems quite limiting to me now that there's
been such a large effort toward standardized internationalization
online, and that most modern OS's are compiled with UTF-8 support from
the start. I know UTF is backwards-compatible with ASCII, so a
transition wouldn't be too difficult, would it? Are there actual
benefits to keeping things strictly ASCII?