[gopher] Re: Fate of the Protocol (was Re: Gopherness)

["Matthew Holevinski" <eylusion@xxxxxxxxx>]

I can humbly tell you why i want to use it, because I'm sick of banner
ads, I'm sick of pop ups, I'm sick of pointless news articles i care
nothing about, i'm sick of web 2.0, i'm sick of signing up on 20,000
websites to read a forum article, or use a service, i'm absolutely
just inundated with sickness with everything the web has become. I use
the internet for 1 purpose to further my understanding of all things
that I normally would not be able to learn about anywhere else. I'm
not going to goto college when all I want is the book, I'm not going
to go to the library because it's incomplete, their are only so many
books in the library and most of them are fiction, I despise fiction
with a passion that the likes of which god has never seen. I'm sick of
everything becoming bloated, we all remember that quaint little 9.6
baud modem, and Gopher caterred to that, just text not extensive
amounts of graphics and multimedia clogging up my bandwidth. Yes it's
nice having a 12meg cable connection, BUT if every gosh darn website I
goto has an index page that forces me to download 10 megs of
information, it's pointless. Just like hardware, yes it's nice having
a quad proc board with 4 quad core processors 12gigs of ram, 3 video
cards, etc, etc. when just simply running Winword.exe on a new vista
machine probably consumes 200 megs of memory, i'm sorry Notepad for me
thank you. Sleek, elegant, efficient, simple, worse is better
programming for me thank you.

That's why i want gopher to regain a foothold on the internet, i'm not
bludgeoned to death with meeting singles in my local area, i'm not
castrated with thousands of sign up pages just to get at the
information I want. Just a simple gopher:// go here, click this, read
that, and i'm done.

Matt

On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 1:23 PM, Roman Pavlov <webmaster@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Kyevan wrote:
>> Are you offering to host a new list? Not everyone has the resources to
>> do so, you know. And of course you wouldn't want to use port 70 to serve
>> notgopher, that would be silly. The best idea seems to be to modify the
>> Gopher protocol in non-backwards-compatible ways (adding headers of some
>> sort to ever resource grab seems to be the big change every other desire
>> relies on)
>
> -- And what's the difference from HTTP then? One can easily use apache
> directory listings to get "gopher with headers".
>
> Here's my opinion on this topic, sorry if I'm repeating someone:
>
> First, it is really strange that people on gopher list are discussing
> not how to support the protocol, but how to replace it. I don't mind if
> someone develops a new protocol and will be running servers on another
> port, but who actually needs it? How it will be promoted? Gopher atleast
> has a solid historical background and mentioned in /etc/services files
> all over the world. Currently, there are about, say, 1% of internet
> users who tried gopher (maybe still an exaggeration) - how much of them
> really need changing the protocol, ever thought about it?
>
> Then, if we still want some changes, I wonder why everyone is so
> reluctant to use gopher+ which already has most of these improvements,
> like mime types support, implemented even better than in HTTP (user can
> choose which mime type to retrieve). However, mime types are technical
> slang, and item types is what average end user cares about: not gif,
> jpeg, png, but just image and that's all. In this perspective gopher0 is
> more user-friendly than gopher+ or HTTP.
>
> As for myself, I feel happy without headers, mime types and even gopher+
> (only using it in testing purposes with UMN gopherd). The only thing
> that needs improvement is UTF-8 support in clients. But this is not a
> protocol level problem.
>
>> The real reason to do this is only to try to hit a middle ground between
>> http and gopher, really. HTTP is huge, unwieldy, and powerful, while
>> gopher is small, simple, and arguably less powerful. Trying to hit a
>> balance so we can handle some more complex things (like download
>> progress indicators and passing files to the right program on the client
>> side) while still keeping things simple enough that cheap, simple (or
>> old) hardware is still all you need to get the basic features out of it.
>>
>> I suppose there's also the gopher+ route of adding extra fields (which
>> actually might be a better option), but is there any way to do that when
>> you send a magic string? It'd be really nice if a client didn't have to
>> know the item type for something before it requested it, but if we keep
>> serving on port 70, we obviously have to send that information in such a
>> way that it doesn't confuse old clients.
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>