Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

gopher.floodgap.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 98 posts

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#31

Post by Johnny_Brahms »

robin_reala wrote: post #11
rev_null wrote: post #4

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.

I think you misunderstood his/her comment. The flexibility that the modern web makes available makes accessibility tools:

  1. harder to implement
  2. More error prone.
Implementing accessibility software for gopher would be a breeze in comparison.

I myself am quite an old grumpy fart, but I would prefer to browse most web sites as gopher sites. I stumble on way too many sites that would have been more usable to everyone had they just skipped those extra 800kb and kept their page below 30kb.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#33

Post by lifthrasiir »

rhabarba wrote: post #25
lifthrasiir wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 rele…

The new(ish) IRCv3 standard does not break compatibility with existing clients though. If they don't support all of its features, they just have less things displayed.

I know IRCv3 is in progress, and I wish it to be successful, but frankly speaking this has been done 10 years ago.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#34

Post by rhabarba »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #33
rhabarba wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The new(ish) IRCv3 standard does not break compatibility with existing clients though. If they don't support all of its features, they just have less things displayed.

I know IRCv3 is in progress, and I wish it to be successful, but frankly speaking this has been done 10 years ago.

Some of the more recent IRC clients already support most its new features, including v3.1.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#36

Post by pointfree »

foota wrote: post #21
pointfree wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think I understand your argument now. Why do you think browsers as de factor operating systems is wrong? Their programming interface is highly standardized across implementations.

> Their programming interface is highly standardized across implementations.

It may be easier to have everyone use the same software and hardware platform everywhere. After all we do want interoperability and we do want everyone to play well with others, but, standardization and portability is a push to stop people from trying new things. The push to standardize everything is an unfortunate consequence of not having a separation of concerns, separate concerns such as content and UI.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#37

Post by spc476 »

rhabarba wrote: post #17

Gopher comes without the multimedia annoyances of the over-engineered Web and it "lacks" people whose business model is to be on it. I like to browse Gopher every now and then. Several people I know even export read-only versions of their blog to Gopher. 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.

I "ported" my blog to gopher as well (gopher://gopher.conman.org/) but it's not a clean port. The gopher client I use (an extension to Firefox) is not UTF-8 aware and thus there are character set issues. Also, there's some loss from the conversion of HTML to plain text (compare gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2017/02/27.1 with http://boston.conman.org/2017/02/27.1).

But it wasn't that difficult to do. And yes, I do see a few people hitting the gopher site.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#39

Post by quanticle »

rfurmani wrote: post #2

Oh wow, that's a blast to the path. The author also wrote the bucktooth gopher server, and I implemented a new (semi-OO Perl) version of it that supported Gopher+. There was always something very satisfying about Gopher, how it made explicit the structure and categories of the data, leaving the front-end to present it how it pleased.

I would also note that others may find the name Cameron Kaiser familiar because he's the maintainer of the TenFourFox (Firefox for PPC OSX [1] ) and Classilla (Mozilla for OS9 [2]) projects.

[1]: http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ [2]: http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/

Post reply on HN