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Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

gopher.floodgap.com

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Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#71

Post by clarry »

stonogo wrote: post #18
foota wrote: post #7

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..…

Forgive me, but you should more specifically define the terms you use. As it stands, it looks like by "functional enough for people to actually want to use it" you seem to introduce a circular dependency -- as though an OS is useless unless it's easy to port a browser to it. 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 Webki…

> 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.

That is an interesting prediction. What do you think will cause the BSDs to be left by the wayside in such a short timeframe, when they are more than capable of running the latest browsers right now?

Is the browser becoming a systemd module?

I am a little concerned about the trend to push "hardware acceleration" into everything. Graphics cards and their drivers are the biggest source of grief in PCs for me.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#72

Post by [deleted] »

rhabarba wrote: post #64
simonh wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#73

Post by huxley »

digi_owl wrote: post #65
simonh wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I wish that myth would die.

Yes, Jobs did a song-and-dance about web apps but not because they didn't want 3rd party apps but because Apple wasn't ready to support developers on what was a new platform. Apple plays it safe.

For one, it's not consistent with the timeline and secondly as the jailbreakers discovered there was quite a bit of infrastructure to support apps even in iPhone OS 1.0.

* iPhone release date: June 29, 2007

* iOS SDK Announced: October 17, 2007

* iOS SDK Released: March 6, 2008

* iPhone OS 2.0 release date: July 11, 2008

Apple had such a tough time providing enough support to developers that they restricted access to the paid developer program to just 4000 (Apple said 25000 tried to join).

There wasn't enough time for everything to happen (including relatively sophisticated tools like the iPhone Simulator) if it was just a reaction to jailbreaking.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#74

Post by beaconstudios »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #57
beaconstudios wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I agree with you completely, especially given all the revelations that have come out about dragnet surveillance, but the OP was talking about web desktops specifically.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#75

Post by olavk »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #53
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.

Not at all, you can do lots of "clever" things in plaintext, like ASCII-art or aligning table columns with whitespace. This is much less accessible and adaptive compared to semantic HTML.

No protocol will prevent people doing fun and clever things or produce content which you think is useless.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#76

Post by simonh »

huxley wrote: post #73
digi_owl wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I wish that myth would die. Yes, Jobs did a song-and-dance about web apps but not because they didn't want 3rd party apps but because Apple wasn't ready to support developers on what was a new platform. Apple plays it safe. For one, it's not consistent with the timeline and secondly as the jailbreakers discovered there was quite a bit of infrastructure to support apps even in iPhone OS 1.0. * iPhone release date: Jun…

Furthermore, the OS itself was initially developed for tablet computers, so apps would have been crucial. Adapting it to a Phone platform with a more limited initial scope was a fairly late stage pivot.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#77

Post by rev_null »

robin_reala wrote: post #29
rev_null wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. There are things that developers could do to make most web sites better for the visually impaired. But that doesn't mean that most web developers use, or even recognize, these best practices. 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.

Right, but text-to-speech is only half of the problem. Gopher by default just uses plain text with no semantics. Without marking up those documents there’s no way to let users jump around within them. Do you honestly expect a visually impaired user to sit and wait while each document they go to is read out to them in its entirety with no heading structure or ability to navigate within the content?

I think that argument worked well for the original web. But the HTML spec has accumulated a lot of things to make design easier, but they also make it easier to represent a page without useful semantic structure.

You mentioned tables, but there were many years where people were using tables in HTML for formatting instead of just expressing tabular data. So div tags were added. Now people sometimes use divs to represent tabular data.

Search is a pretty good way to navigate content, and is simple for raw text. An index is an even better way, and is supported quite well by gopher.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#78

Post by robin_reala »

rev_null wrote: post #77
robin_reala wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Right, but text-to-speech is only half of the problem. Gopher by default just uses plain text with no semantics. Without marking up those documents there’s no way to let users jump around within them. Do you honestly expect a visually impaired user to sit and wait while each document they go to is read out to them in its entirety with no heading structure or ability to navigate within the content?

I think that argument worked well for the original web. But the HTML spec has accumulated a lot of things to make design easier, but they also make it easier to represent a page without useful semantic structure. You mentioned tables, but there were many years where people were using tables in HTML for formatting instead of just expressing tabular data. So div tags were added. Now people sometimes use divs to represe…

people were using tables in HTML for formatting instead of just expressing tabular data

Yep, and there are algorithms that try to distinguish between ‘data’ tables versus ‘layout’ tables for precisely that reason[1][2]. It’s unfortunate that they have to exist, but the web has routed around past mistakes.

Now people sometimes use divs to represent tabular data.

Yes, and that’s wrong and a simple fix. But regardless of whether some ill-informed people do that it’s still no worse than Gopher, and when they get it right it’s a lot better.

Regarding search, that’s great if you have exact keywords for what you’re looking for. Less good if you just want e.g. a list of headers on the page so that you can narrow in on the part that interests you.

[1] https://dxr.mozilla.org/mozilla-central/source/accessible/ht...

[2] https://cs.chromium.org/chromium/src/third_party/WebKit/Sour...

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#79

Post by ramblerman »

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_).

> The web doesn't give me this (it doesn't matter if it _could_).

If it was important then the web would cater to it. It's simple economics.

We could create protocols for all the sub needs and desires that people may have but that would be restrictive.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#80

Post by mjburgess »

ramblerman wrote: post #79
rikkus wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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_).

> The web doesn't give me this (it doesn't matter if it _could_). If it was important then the web would cater to it. It's simple economics. We could create protocols for all the sub needs and desires that people may have but that would be restrictive.

Popularity =/= Economic Viability =/= Importance.

The market is NOT a mechanism for delivering what is important.

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