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Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

gopher.floodgap.com

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Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#51

Post by rikkus »

olavk wrote: post #41

I don't get this. It seems to me Gopher basically supports a subset of what is available on the web. All the benefits of Gopher (low bandwidth requirements, no flashy design or interactivity, strict hierarchical navigation etc.) can also be achieved with stripped-down web pages. I see no benefit at all to having a separate protocol. Gopher is cool as a slice of history though.

"All the benefits of Gopher [...] can also be achieved with stripped-down web pages"

Can be achieved, but aren't. I'd love a consistent, stripped-down interface. The web doesn't give me this (it doesn't matter if it _could_).

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#52

Post by lmm »

olavk wrote: post #41

I don't get this. It seems to me Gopher basically supports a subset of what is available on the web. All the benefits of Gopher (low bandwidth requirements, no flashy design or interactivity, strict hierarchical navigation etc.) can also be achieved with stripped-down web pages. I see no benefit at all to having a separate protocol. Gopher is cool as a slice of history though.

You can't be confident of getting a stripped-down web page before you click the link. Trivial example: I can click a gopher link and be confident whatever's on the other end is not going to make a noise.

Human vigilance is fallible. Protocol-level enforcement is necessary.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#53

Post by amiga-workbench »

olavk wrote: post #41

I don't get this. It seems to me Gopher basically supports a subset of what is available on the web. All the benefits of Gopher (low bandwidth requirements, no flashy design or interactivity, strict hierarchical navigation etc.) can also be achieved with stripped-down web pages. I see no benefit at all to having a separate protocol. Gopher is cool as a slice of history though.

It stops designers and developers from being "clever" The user gets pages that are highly accessible, straight to the point and free from javascript malware.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#54

Post by simonh »

rikkus wrote: post #51
olavk wrote: post #41

I don't get this. It seems to me Gopher basically supports a subset of what is available on the web. All the benefits of Gopher (low bandwidth requirements, no flashy design or interactivity, strict hierarchical navigation etc.) can also be achieved with stripped-down web pages. I see no benefit at all to having a separate protocol. Gopher is cool as a slice of history though.

"All the benefits of Gopher [...] can also be achieved with stripped-down web pages" Can be achieved, but aren't. I'd love a consistent, stripped-down interface. The web doesn't give me this (it doesn't matter if it _could_).

As a client you have no control over this though, because you can't make people provide services using Gopher instead of HTTP.

To put it another way, for someone wanting to provide a service it's daft to choose Gopher 'because it's lightweight'. If you're providing the service, nobody can stop you providing a lightweight HTTP service and in fact doing so is mind numbingly easy. Just do it.

Or provide a URL link to an FTP server. Gopher was basically just a nicer to use menu based alternative to ftp, but visual browser ftp clients are pretty much that now anyway.

Having said all that, it is kind of cool that Gopher is still around. I was using it years before HTTP even existed. If Gopher is going to exits then yes, being lightweight is one of it's strengths, but pretending that this meaningfully distinguishes it from HTTP doesn't strike me as a very strong argument. I suspect a lot of it's attraction is techie cultural exclusivity and contrariness. Not that I have anything against those things whatsoever.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#55

Post by Symbiote »

rev_null wrote: post #4

Gopher is way more friendly for the visually impaired than the modern web.

That claim needs some evidence. Is there a good example? All the sites I can find are either toys or archives of university sites from the 1990s.

From those sites:

There is a lot of completely inaccessible ASCII art.

Everything is shown in a plain monospaced font, including tabular data. Emphasis can only be done using asterisks, capital letters or similar.

Images can't be embedded with context, only linked to -- at the end of the document.

Links can't be shown in context, only at the end of a document.

Only ASCII text works.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#56

Post by simonh »

pointfree wrote: post #5

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…

> A clean and consistent system will be out of reach as long as this web app nonsense continues.

Isn't that exactly what iOS and Android are though? I mean most of the criticisms of iOS are against Apple's obsessive curation of it's simplicity and usability, and it 'came to power' smack in the middle of the internet age. People are always complaining that native apps for internet services are a threat to the web. It seems to be exactly the thing you're saying the web makes impossible.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#57

Post by TeMPOraL »

beaconstudios wrote: post #49
7373737373 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Web desktops may be the next step. As much as people are joking about running Javascript on metal, the idea of running a universally accepted virtual machine (WebAssembly?) and building a high level language and operating system on top of it seems to have some merit. See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferno_(operating_system) http://urbit.org/docs/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_desktop

the idea of a web desktop doesn't make sense when we have services like google docs and dropbox that perform the roles of the desktop without the overhead of installing software. The desktop was a forced requirement while content had to be centralised on your PC, why bother with it now that we're freed from that constraint?

> The desktop was a forced requirement while content had to be centralised on your PC, why bother with it now that we're freed from that constraint?

Because some of us want content to be centralized on our PCs. We want to own our data, instead of giving it away and then renting back access to it. Related, I consider the push towards abstracting away the file system to be a very bad thing.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#58

Post by TeMPOraL »

oblio wrote: post #50
rimliu wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You mean web apps? Because the web itself was fine till everyone started thinking that anything on the web must be an application. And that web must "win" mobile for some reason.

You'll understand that "some reason" when you'll want some cool, fancy, useful app and the vendor will have not developed a version for your current mobile OS.

Few of web apps are useful, though, and all suffer severe performance and UX penalty by the very virtue of being run within a browser.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#59

Post by TeMPOraL »

pointfree wrote: post #36
foota wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Not sure what you mean by standardization vs. exploratory programming. Separation of concerns would only exist if standardized (and enforced).

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#60

Post by oblio »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #58
oblio wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll understand that "some reason" when you'll want some cool, fancy, useful app and the vendor will have not developed a version for your current mobile OS.

Few of web apps are useful, though, and all suffer severe performance and UX penalty by the very virtue of being run within a browser.

Few of any kind of apps are useful.

The non-purists (which is most people) have decided that availability trumps everything.

I was more of a purist, myself, but after some bad experiences with the lack of native apps, I'm more of a realist these days.

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