Thursday  9 May 2024

The World Wide Web kept gopher pure
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Not long after Gopher was developed, the Word Wide Web came into
being. Sometimes I wonder, what would have happened if Tim Berners-Lee
had not come up with the Word Wide Web. How would this have influenced
the evolution of our beloved protocol?

Of course, we can only speculate.

Hypertext
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Hyperlinks is what makes the Word Wide Web.

Hypertext was already in use at the time. If the Word Wide Web didn't
happen, surely some other form of hypertext would have come forward.

Perhaps Gopher would have evolved to supporting the texinfo syntax, or
some other hypertext format.

Plain text is dull
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As much as we like plain text, it is not a medium for the masses.

Plain text is dull, most people don't like reading text without some
images. In order to gain attraction, there would be a lot of pressure
to support this in some way or another. 

The most obvious way would be to enhance the Gopher clients to support
some file format that can embed images. Maybe we would now be opening
Postscript files, or PDF files in our Gopher clients.

Multimedia
----------
Once embedded images are part of every day Gophering, it is not hard
to imagine the extension to other forms, like sound and video.

Slowly, our Gopher clients would evolve into something that comes
close to the current web browsers. Convenient, easy to use, and with
the appeal of sound and vision, Gopher would become a popular medium.

Scripting and advertising
-------------------------
Now it becomes really scary.

Once Gopher has penetrated the everyday life of the masses, advertising
is around the corner. And advertisers need something to justify the
costs, so measuring the number of eyeballs reached by their campaigns.

And the next step, as we know, would be to profile the world population
and act upon that. 

Be grateful for the Word Wide Web
---------------------------------
So, let's be grateful for the Word Wide Web. It has sucked up all those
marvelous inventions, and by doing this, it kept Gopher pure.

Because of this, we can enjoy our dull pages, filled with only text,
and without the glamour of auto playing videos, or bandwidth sucking
ads.


Last edited: $Date: 2024/05/09 08:20:39 $