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Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

gopher.floodgap.com

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Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#91

Post by pnathan »

rimliu wrote: post #22
pnathan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

Web apps have been the default approach for over a decade now. The O.G. vision of the web / netscape was to have a virtual OS, platform independent. I think it's time to lay the idea of the webapp as somehow being this alien thing to rest...

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#92

Post by dredmorbius »

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.

Gresham's law, market for lemons.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#93

Post by dredmorbius »

oblio wrote: post #46
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…

Have you ever thought about the fact that most people don't like innovation and don't need it? They want and need well tested incremental updates to proven technologies. There is still innovation happening in operating systems, it just doesn't reach mass adoption because most of it doesn't provide real-life benefits to the mass market. Some of the more practical aspects trickle down to mainstream OSes. We're past the…

http://heinonline.org/hol-cgi-bin/get_pdf.cgi?handle=hein.jo...

This is the paper Isaac Asimov researched as an undergrad, and was the basis of his first sci-fi story sold.

There's a lot of material on this topic.

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=resistance+to+technological+innova...

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#94

Post by dredmorbius »

simonh wrote: post #61
rhabarba wrote: post #30

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!).

I blame the person from Porlock.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#95

Post by adiabatty »

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…

> Search is a pretty good way to navigate content, and is simple for raw text.

Gamefaqs hosts plain-text documents. Some of them are quite long and well-structured. Since there's no intra-document linking like with HTML, newer documents tend to have hashtags in the TOC to make Ctrl-F searching easier.

I'd much rather have intra-document links I can click on. That way, as a document author, I can direct readers to the dedicated "All The Monsters You'll Ever Fight" section from anywhere in the document without adding the string "#monsters" all throughout the document, generating false positives for the Ctrl-F-using reader.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#96

Post by 7373737373 »

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?

It's all about namespaces. You can access local files the same way you access web resources and vice versa.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#97

Post by lmm »

olavk wrote: post #66
lmm wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

There are people who prefer Gopher and/or particular known sites. If you can see from the URL that a site will be non-horribly designed then that's fine, and if the only option is HTTP then you put up with it.

Re: Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

#98

Post by mydeardiary »

Gopher doesn't support encryption. There is no standard for gopher over tls. This makes gopher irrelevant for encrypted communications. But what makes it great: gopher is simple. You can use curl or even netcat for browsing gopher sites.
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