June 2019 Archives
Gopher is not the Web
dotcomboom
Every now and then, I see new Gopher clients and sites popping up. And that's great—we're keeping this protocol alive for the next generation. However, I can't help but think some of the methods of doing so is restrictive, only getting the "Gopher is a list of links" part.
Back when NCSA Mosaic came out, it supported the Gopher protocol by generating an HTML equivalent to each menu. The idea of that makes sense; I mean, you already have a web browser that technically is capable of displaying the same content. This behavior has been replicated many times by the major web browsers and fellow gophermeisters over time when implementing Gopher support to client software.
The problem with that, however, is that you miss out on the potential that Gopher menus have to be not just a list of links. It's important to understand that Gopher is as much a file transfer protocol as, say, anonymous FTP is, and it would make an amount of sense to implement it similarly. There are two main features that I would like to see more often in modern Gopher clients that stem from this and I will talk about them now. Get the popcorn.