Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 06:59:00 -0600 (CST)
From: gurno@charter.net
Subject: [gopher] Re: The road ahead
To: gopher@complete.org
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On 20 Mar, David Allen wrote:

[snip] 
> When making protocol changes, I think this question is important:
> "what is gopher to you?"  What should gopher be able to do?  What
> areas should it not mess with?  Which parts of Gopher+ were good, and
> which were just lousy ideas?

If anything, I'd like to keep Gopher mostly as-is, but fix some of the
deficiencies with better ideas that have come along since the
original...

+ I'd like a well-defined way to send descriptive strings - i.e. the
'info', only defined as such.  What I'm trying to say is that using info
seems 'kludgey' to me and I'd like a better way to say "Welcome to my
Gopherhole!".

+ A page title would be nice too - I think that this would be extremely
helpful when bookmarking.

+ Fully qualified URLs for links.  Rather than breaking it up across
tabs, I would much rather see ...\tgopher://foo.foo/1:8080 - I think
that it's easier to maintain and much more readable.

+ And I think that the Google-ization of the Web has shown that helpful
searching is the 'killer app'.  With that in mind, meta information
about a page, like the Keywords and Descriptions available if the robot
would want it.  (Clients don't really care, do they?)

+ What sort of character support is out there?  The 'net is fa-a-ar more
international than it was back in the day - I think we need more than
UTF-8 (or whatever)

What I *don't* want to see:

- The ability for the Client to send (much) information back.  Sorry, I
  know that this is a popular thing with people.  This sort of thing
  raises the complexity immediately for both the clients and server.
  This breaks the 'dumb' client, smart server idea that was mentioned in
  the Gopher specs way back when.  It's also opens the door for many
  things that I think are wrong with the web - cookies, tracking, etc.
  If you want state data, go to the web.

- Formatting information.  I'd support a simple left|center|right
  alignment for the text strings (see above), but outside of that we'd
  be setting ourself up for the HTML/CSS/Flash wars that are raging
  right now.  (This includes fonts)

That's all I can think of now.  How about some name ideas - since we're
treading on a new spec that's a break from the old one, how about
"Gopher?" ;^)  "Gopher2" would be a good one also.  ("Gopher!", to drive
home the point...)

Adam 


-- 
Adam Gurno
adam@gurno.com
GPG Key: http://gurno.com/adam/adam.txt


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