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Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

gopher.floodgap.com

61–70 of 98 posts

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#61
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is a bad reinvention of distributed RPCs on desktop systems, imo.

The web is a broken and incomplete adaption of Xanadu.

Xanadu is a broken and incomplete implementation of Xanadu, and has been for more than my entire lifespan (child of the 60s baby!).

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#62

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…

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

http://www.windows93.net/

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#63

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…

The web, at least the part most people interact with, is more like a throwback to leased terminals.

The real computation happen on a far away pile of hardware, with the local computer just being responsible for drawing the updates on screen based on the results coming over the wire.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#64
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The web is a broken and incomplete adaption of Xanadu.

Xanadu is a broken and incomplete implementation of Xanadu, and has been for more than my entire lifespan (child of the 60s baby!).

Which is not enough reason to prefer an implementation which dropped Xanadu's probably most important feature (two-side links) from the beginning.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#65
post #56

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…

Dunno. Initially iPhone was not supposed to have apps at all.

Apple even release a web framework for making sites that looked and behaved as if it was native to iPhone.

Only after the jailbreakers enabled third parties to fool around with the guts did we see apps happen. And initially Jobs wants to sue those app devs and distributors into oblivion.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#66
post #52
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.

Are you suggesting there are some people who only browse Gopher?

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#67
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.

The big thing, as best i can tell, is that gopher is built around exposing a FHS and letting the user browse it rather than mask the FHS behind urls and links inside the documents themselves.

Gopher as a protocol can serve up any odd file format, HTML included, if one so wants.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#70

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…

There's the web, then there are tons of other protocols out there to use on the Internet. And browsing using lynx/links/elinks is quite possible.
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