[gopher] Re: New Gopher server and client

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The HTTP protocol has had "multiview" for years.  And the implementation has 
been (except in a few EU countries)... almost non-existent.  If hardly anyone 
is using multiview in HTTP, the possibility of anyone using multiview on Gopher 
is extremely unlikely.  
 
Multiview requires that the Server operator maintain the multiview offerings.  
With Gopher now just a "hobbyists" protocol, it is improbable that anyone would 
take the time to maintain the alternative views (and if you think this is not 
so, just look at how often your favorite Gopher server operator currently 
updates their regular pages).  
 
That being said, I am NOT against multiview.  I just feel that energy would be 
better spent upon other areas of the Protocol that need to be implemented, 
revised, or shored-up first.  
--- On Mon, 2/16/09, Mateusz Viste <mateusz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

From: Mateusz Viste <mateusz@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: [gopher] Re: New Gopher server and client
To: gopher@xxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Monday, February 16, 2009, 4:04 PM

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On Monday 16 February 2009 21:45, Matja¾ Me¹njak wrote:
> Well, the gopher server I am working on is a gopher+ server. And from
> admin's point of view it will be the same as maintaining normal gopher
> server. Multiviews are automatically generated (plain text is
> converted to postscript, rtf, pdf, xml, html) on the fly. The only
> thing I have not yet worked out is how to do ASK forms in some generic
> way (and perhaps some scripting would be nice to have too). Multiview
> is what in my opinion makes all the difference when compared to http.

I would say it depends of personal tastes :-)

I understand that you will convert text files to rtf/pdf/html....   What
charset will you declare in these documents? Will you analyze each file to
determine what charset could possibly be used (UTF8, Latin2, ISO-8859-1,
ISO-8859-2, KOI8, etc..."? If not, then I see no point in that...

What if you get a PDF file? Will you convert it to html and text, to allow
multiview?

What will you do with graphic files? Will you convert any file to bmp, jpeg,
png, gif, etc...? What if one graphic file contains alpha channels, and the
destination format doesn't handle transparency (png -> jpg)?

Multiview is a nice (well, at least "interesting") feature. However,
to be really efficient it has to be done by the administrator, which sets up
different versions of a document. Such settings are much work for an admin,
compared to just putting a bunch of text files on the server... ;-)

Best regards,
Mateusz Viste
- -- 
You'll find my public OpenPGP key at gopher://gopher.viste-family.net/1/PGP
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