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Gopher is way more friendly for the visually impaired than the modern web.
There's also a slow movement to add gopherholes to the tor network. A list of the current known ones can be found here; http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://bitreich.org:7...
The web is like an operating system that you are locked into using. This prevents alternative operating systems such as Plan 9 from ever becoming useful, because building a web browser is such a monumental effort. Even if a decent web browser were built for Plan 9 it would defeat the purpose of using such an alternative OS because the web binds software to content. The web has effectively killed innovation in operati…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get why this is getting down voted. I heard gopher before but never used it. I have two browsers (firefox and chrome) and gopher links failed on both. So I checked wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Native_Gophe... And it is not supported in any of 4 most commonly used browser (except there is an add-on for firefox, you can write an add-on for anything anyway). (Edit: 5 actually, I for…
Relevancy is a measure of subjective scope. Things that are relevant to some might be irrelevant to others. Gopher might not be relevant to society as a whole but to a subset of hackers (hi!). Parent's comment is effortless snark so it deserves any downvote it acquires.
Nuclear physics interests a handful of people only, yet it is relevant, as society would have problems sustaining its operation without nuclear power. Gopher is interesting for even less people, and it is irrelevant, as society would go on just as well without it.
Low processing power need? A 10$ Raspberry Pi packs more power than the notebook I saved for 10 years ago.
A link to all known gopher servers? It is, in gopher protocol, which I cannot check as none of my browsers support this. This is what is your definition to relevancy is? Because it is not mine.
A webpage written in Nepali is infinitely more relevant to most users, as they can access it, and use everyday tools (like google translate) to have an idea in the page.
Gopher is about as relevant as the International Toothpick Collector Association's Annual Report on the Proceedings of Toothpick Size Irregularities.
It's not.
The author didn't say "popular" he said "relevant" The current state of software development has huge issues with needless complexity resulting from poorly chosen abstractions. Gopher and IRC make it possible to use any client of your choosing, thus keeping innovation and improvements accessible to anyone with an idea.
I agree to the former and disagree to the latter---they are not correlated. In fact, IRC has demonstrated that it might be hard to adapt to new requirements without breaking many things (no matter it's an existing client, a community or a requirement itself). Today the relevance of IRC is mostly due to the existing community and not due to the technical innovation, and casual users wouldn't benefit from that. I don't know much about Gopher but I haven't seen any counterevidence to this observation.
Gopher is way more friendly for the visually impaired than the modern web.
If by friendly you mean ‘irrelevant’. There’s plenty of easy things that developers can do to their sites to make them more accessible that don’t require rewriting them as a gopher site.
Gopher, on the other hand, simply only supports textual navigation that is easy to feed to a text-to-speech engine. The developer doesn't need to even think about these issues.
I planned to write a new Gopher app for Android a while ago but I haven't finished it yet. This article reminds me to try again. Thanks.
The web is like an operating system that you are locked into using. This prevents alternative operating systems such as Plan 9 from ever becoming useful, because building a web browser is such a monumental effort. Even if a decent web browser were built for Plan 9 it would defeat the purpose of using such an alternative OS because the web binds software to content. The web has effectively killed innovation in operati…
I disagree, while writing a web browser would be significant work, it would likely be on the same order as writing an operating functional enough for people to actually want to use it. Porting a browser would likely take less work even (while still being a significant amount of work). This page talks about what it takes to port webkit to another platform: http://blog.cranksoftware.com/webkit-porting-tips-the-good-t..…
The GP post mentiones Plan 9, which is a great example here. There are real people who use Plan 9 every day (I have met some of them!) but Webkit will never be portable to that OS because there is no C++ compiler. This doesn't make the OS non-functional, but it does mean step one to porting a modern browser is "port GCC or LLVM," which is a massive task by itself.
Both Firefox and Chrome source code repositories are in the hundreds of megabytes, even without the required host OS dependencies vendored in. The document you linked to recommends leveraging freetype, cairo, and all kinds of other things that would require serious graphics infrastructure of a sort that's just not feasible.
Modern web browsers are keystones that cap off arches built of hundreds of pieces of very specific software. As time goes by, they require more infrastructure, not less -- c.f. Firefox, where to build the latest version you must also have a Rust compiler that targets your operating system. As the checklist of requirements grows ever longer, the candidate operating systems capable of meeting those requirements grows ever shorter.
Five years from now, I predict the only three operating systems capable of interacting with the web in any meaningful sense will be linux, macos, and windows; bsd and haiku et al will have been left by the wayside.
Ten years from now I predict there will be four operating systems, and one of them will be Fuchsia, because only a megacorp like Google has the resources to accomplish that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I disagree, while writing a web browser would be significant work, it would likely be on the same order as writing an operating functional enough for people to actually want to use it. Porting a browser would likely take less work even (while still being a significant amount of work). This page talks about what it takes to port webkit to another platform: http://blog.cranksoftware.com/webkit-porting-tips-the-good-t..…
Sure you could port webkit to your new OS, but if all the software you use effectively exists only as web apps what would be the point?
This lets you take advantage of whatever benefits your desired system provides you without a change of user experience.
The web is like an operating system that you are locked into using. This prevents alternative operating systems such as Plan 9 from ever becoming useful, because building a web browser is such a monumental effort. Even if a decent web browser were built for Plan 9 it would defeat the purpose of using such an alternative OS because the web binds software to content. The web has effectively killed innovation in operati…