[gopher] Re: Gopherness

[JumpJet Mailbox <jumpjetinfo@xxxxxxxxx>]

No, I seem to not have made myself clear... I am NOT advocating ditching all 
other character sets.
 
On Gopher, when your examine a directory (Item Type "1"), you will ONLY see the 
names of files (or a specially created alias for the file name) and the text of 
Item Type "i".  All other objects in Gopher (be they text documents, binarary 
files, or whatever), must be opened in order to view their contents.  I am more 
than willing to accept that these file names (or their alias) and the contents 
of Item Type "i" be in any character set desired (UTF-8, Big-5, or whatever).  
If I visit, as an arbitrary example, a chinese Server; it matters not to me 
that the menus appear in chinese with chinese characters.
 
As for the files that must be Opened (Item Type "g", "9", or whatever), it 
again doesn't matter what character set you use inside these files.  ALL I am 
saying is that we reserve ONE Item Type as an expected "universal" method of 
communication.  An Item Type that, IF you want to leave a message for ANY 
computer user, can be Opened and Interpereted by ANY computer.  
 
I propose that this "universal" communication files Item Type be Item Type "0" 
(due to all known Clients already understanding how to open, and print, this 
Item Type), and that the character set used in this "universal" Item Type be 
ASCII.   Thats all... no more, no less.  

--- On Tue, 8/12/08, Hugh Guiney <hugh.guiney@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From: Hugh Guiney <hugh.guiney@xxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [gopher] Re: Gopherness
To: gopher@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Tuesday, August 12, 2008, 3:37 AM

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.