[gopher] Re: Item Type Suggestions

["Jay Nemrow" <jnemrow@xxxxxxx>]

Cameron is right.  I got confused a while back about how URLs relate
to "magic strings" in gopher and concluded that although there might
be a correlation, there doesn't have to be.  Even the idea that a
particular magic string correlates to a particular item is not perfect
- the magic string has only as much relevance to anything as the
server you are communicating with chooses to give it.  I was thinking
about this when I realized there there are really no error messages in
gopher - the server simply serves some content (perhaps a "hey, I
don't understand you") based on the magic string you gave - it is
still working just fine and sending a resource in response to your
string.  Although you may construe a message as an error, the server
is still just serving up a resource according to a magic string.

I could give a magic string like this
"I@HaTe&GrImE*too|\[]uyiuysdfpuyui" and the server can give a reply,
including a specific resource that is actually referenced using this
particular string.  The fact that the magic string often looks like a
filesystem reference just indicates that mapping strings to a
filesystem is an easy way to arrange things.  This opens up a wild and
wooly world where virtual resources can be worked with as readily as
nice directory/file entities are (without working hard to force
virtual data into some directory/file paradigm).  Actually, web
servers can work the same way (and often do under CGI), but
directory/file conventions are almost set in stone in many people's
minds.  It doesn't have to be that way and neither gopher nor web
clients should not suppose that things have to be that way.

On Sun, Aug 3, 2008 at 10:37 PM, Cameron Kaiser <spectre@xxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
>> > > Exactly - you can't rely on '/' being the separator, or that the last
>> > > section cut off yields the valid parent dir, or even that there are
>> > > directories.
>
>> > And here goes an example against the method I suggested.
>> > An url pointing at a jumpjet resource:
>
>> Backslashes are a native feature of all DOS and Windows based Gopher
>> Servers.
>
> Exactly. What Nuno was getting at is that the path separator will vary from
> system to system -- off the top of my head, I can think of \ (FAT), /, :
> (Mac HFS), etc. And then there's VMS, and ...
>
> I even have an old Alpha Micro server here and it doesn't *have* a concept
> of paths at all, just ersatzes, disks and PPNs.
>
> AFAIC, trying to parse the selector for parent menus is just going to be a
> big kludge and won't work all the time or everywhere.
>
> --
> ------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ 
> --
>  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser@xxxxxxxxxxxx
> -- With a rubber duck, one's never alone. -- Douglas Adams, "HGTTG" 
> -----------
>
>
>