never sent to the server, but is intercepted by the web browser to tell it
how to handle the data. For example, a URL like

gopher://floodgap.com/1/v2/

tells the browser this is item type 1, a gopher menu, and it sends /v2/ to
the server. Some servers like getting a second copy of the item type, so
they'll have

gopher://slacker.invalid/11/v2/

but the browser will still take that first '1' off and send 1/v2/ to the
server, so you can still count on getting that item type.

> > True; a Mac HFS gopher server, of which there are some, uses ":".
> 
> Makes me wonder: how do webbrowsers translate these server's selector to
> an URI? Does it leave in the ":" or replace it with a "/"? Just curious.

They leave it in (at least Netscape seems to). Remember that everything in
a gopher menu is a fully-qualified "path" so the browser doesn't have to
worry about what a path delimiter is and isn't -- it just passes the entire
selector along and lets the server deal with it.

-- 
----------------------------- personal page: http://www.armory.com/~spectre/ --
 Cameron Kaiser, Point Loma Nazarene University * ckaiser@stockholm.ptloma.edu
-- The first duty of a revolutionary is to get away with it. -- Abbie Hoffman -