[gopher] Re: Gopherness

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

On Sun, Aug 10, 2008 at 5:41 PM, JumpJet Mailbox <jumpjetinfo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Assuming that "Internationlization" is indeed a good thing.  Remember, Morse 
> Code is "International", but the character set has NOT been extended to 
> accomodate non-US alphabets.  So, why not insist that Gopher TEXT documents 
> (Gopher Item Type 0) ONLY be written using ASCII characters.

Why _wouldn't_ internationalization be a good thing? The Internet is
all about connecting people. What benefit is it then to close off an
entire section of people and resources to all the other ones, merely
because of allegiance to a 128-character (33 of which we can't see),
7-bit only encoding scheme?

Unicode is the most popular encoding in use on the Web today. If we
limit ourselves to ASCII--and for no other purpose than
backwards-compatibility, which is a problem the Unicode Consortium
already solved--then not only are we limiting Gopher's usefulness and
potential userbase, but we will surely be stuck in the past.

> If someone desires to use other characters (including "made up ones"), they 
> can type them into a document format that supports the characters (.RTF, 
> .DOC, and etceteras), or even a PDF file.  As a last resort, they can even 
> offer the document as a picture file (.GIF, .JPG, and etceteras).  Keeping 
> Item Type 0 "pure" (and I am only talking about Item Type 0) will forever 
> allow communication compatability with ALL computers, of any era.

To put things in perspective here: would you really want to use a
protocol if it meant writing all of your documents using a double-byte
character set and serving all of your ASCII text as octet-streams or
screenshots? Does compatibility really demand such a rigid stance on
this issue? I can even see the computers of the future possibly
phasing out many of the extraneous encoding schemes we have today.
While strict ASCII may never disappear completely, UTF-8 is much more
future-proof.

> It is my understanding that the Only reason for the recent push towards 
> "Internationalization" on the Internet is to accomodate "pretty" WEB pages 
> and Email messages (so the Browser/Mail software can render a webpage/email, 
> billboard-like, on screen in a native language; rather than just offering the 
> document as a separate download).  In fact, it has gotten so bad (with 
> "table" formatting and all) that very often you can't even print out a web 
> page (or even certain emails).

There's nothing inherently "prettier" about rendering a _plain_ text
document with the choice of using non-roman glyphs, than there is
about rendering a plain text document with *only* roman glyphs. I
hardly see something like this[1] as "billboard-like."

[1] http://www.alanwood.net/unicode/notepad.gif

And the state of "table" formatting on the Web is not as bad as it
used to be--there are still far more broken pages than unbroken ones,
but the meme of using valid, semantic HTML markup has caught on in
small doses and table-based layouts are now mostly (and rightfully)
considered to be "evil."

On Sat, Aug 9, 2008 at 7:46 PM, JumpJet Mailbox <jumpjetinfo@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> For Starters, we can report on how the Clients each of us are using are 
> handling this (and could someone run a UTF-8 Gopher Server that we can test 
> our Clients against)?

I think this is a good idea and would be willing to help with that.