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Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

gopher.floodgap.com

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Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#81

Post by NoGravitas »

lmm wrote: post #52
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.

You could use a stripped-down client. There are currently compatibility problems (with using Lynx, elinks, dillo, etc), but most of those are probably surmountable. I can easily imagine a browser that guarantees either a reader-mode/AMP-like experience or a graceful failure.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#82

Post by sp332 »

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.

The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay sane on autoplaying video ad-covered sites.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#83

Post by NoGravitas »

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.

Is there an existing gopher client for Android? I couldn't find one on the Play store, but that could be because of search problems.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#84

Post by NoGravitas »

Entangled wrote: post #68
nvarsj wrote: post #35

This made me laugh: gopher://gopher.frog.tips/0/JOB_OPENINGS

Browsers won't process that request, so for the uninitiated like me: $ curl gopher://gopher.frog.tips/0/JOB_OPENINGS * My first ever gopher interaction.

Or: http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://gopher.frog.ti...

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#85

Post by rhabarba »

NoGravitas wrote: post #83
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.

Is there an existing gopher client for Android? I couldn't find one on the Play store, but that could be because of search problems.

Yes, the Floodgap guy has its own Android client available on his website. Sadly, it follows the design conventions from Android 1.5 or so.

http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#86

Post by draven »

spc476 wrote: post #37
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 d…

I just tested your blog with OverbiteFF (I guess that's the client you're using), and I had to manually switch the encoding to Unicode (View->Text Encoding.) I see there's an "item type" field in the protocol, it's set to 0 (ie "plain text file") for your blog entries. The protocol doesn't seem to offer anything to specify the encoding to the client, so overbite must default to something like plain ascii.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#87

Post by jasonkostempski »

lmm wrote: post #52
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.

I've been thinking about making a site that only takes links to text/plain and other non-mixed-media content. I haven't been able to find one if it exists. I'd also love search engines to support media type filters.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#88

Post by basscomm »

Entangled wrote: post #68
nvarsj wrote: post #35

This made me laugh: gopher://gopher.frog.tips/0/JOB_OPENINGS

Browsers won't process that request, so for the uninitiated like me: $ curl gopher://gopher.frog.tips/0/JOB_OPENINGS * My first ever gopher interaction.

I'm using Lynx, which understood that request just fine.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#89

Post by pointfree »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #59
pointfree wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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).

A smaller contact area between implementations means we need only be concerned about compatibility at that interface and the rest is up to you. This keeps the area of software that we can't change to a minimum.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#90

Post by jancsika »

Johnny_Brahms wrote: post #31
robin_reala wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 everyon…

Let's take a trivial example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open-source_mobile_pho...

Let's say we are both on an unreliable wifi connection (perhaps on a train) and want to find the most recently-released entry in the table. Then we want to sort the data by each of the other columns of the table.

I click a heading and navigate to the bottom row of the table and see 2016. Done. Then, whenever I am ready I click each of the other four headings to sort the data again. This exhausts the effort I need to expend in order to get sorted views of the same data. And no network access was required to do this (which is nice for non-trivial table sizes).

With Gopher, what user actions are needed to get the same views of the data? How much effort do these user actions require?

Edit: also, are those user actions discoverable? At least visually Wikipedia's table gives me two arrows and a cursor icon change to make it apparent I can click to change the view of the data. As far as accessibility, there is a "title" attribute with the value "Sort ascending" that I presume would get read by a screen-reader.

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