[gopher] Re: Gopherness

[Kyevan <kyevan@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Jay Nemrow wrote:
> "Updated" nostalgia is not nostalgia at all.

Sure, but an improved Gopher could have practical uses. I think, 
perhaps, it might be a better idea to start from nearly scratch and 
create a new protocol that takes the best ideas from Gopher (the 
simplicity of the client! the structured layout!) and add and modifies 
features that we feel would be useful (Replace the limited item type 
system with something based on MIME types (which has the useful fallback 
of "display unknown text/* types as text, everything else unknown should 
be treated as application/octet-stream"), sending some metadata in the 
response, perhaps define a way to send requests with data).

This is different than extending Gopher in that we DON'T worry about 
backwards compatibility - at least, not on the protocol level. Servers 
that speak both Gopher and Comepher (or another bad pun, since those 
seem to be inevitable) would be a Good Thing.