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re: The state of gopher
February 05th, 2024
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IanJ of gopher.icu wrote a quick rant on things that bother him
about the current state of gopher[0]. In short, line length,
misuse of type i, and escape codes for things like color
deccoration. We run into this sort of gopher purism a lot in the
bitreich community. It's not new, and it's also a perfectly fine
opinion. I just don't share it.
(TXT) [0] The state of gopher
Lets talk about the three mentioned things in turn:
First: Lines should be 70 charactes or fewer.
This is indeed in the spec, and it was the impetus for my choosing
sixty-seven as the line length I use here on gopher.black. But in
general a line length of 80 or fewer characters won't cause
problems for anyone on a desktop and a line length of 67 is still
far too wide to be useful on mobile. So what are we to do?
Some people forgo wrapping at all, assuming clients are capable of
wrapping if they're sosphisticated. Others pick a comfortable
middle-ground (often 80) and stick with it half out of convenience
and half because it's good enough. Still others who use gopher on
mobile choose to go crazy and use very narrow posts that fit those
screens.
To the spec it's wrong, but the spec doesn't have feelings. The
spec doesn't use gopher. If someone is on their phone and very
narrow lines make their use case better then that's absolutely the
right call. At the end of the day it just isn't very important.
Second: misuse of type-i
From a historical perspective type i wasn't even in the spec, but
it was already in widespread use in gopherspace within the first
year of its launch. Clients adjusted, use adjusted. RFC-1436[1]
never learned to time travel, though, and remains sadly silent on
the topic.
(TXT) [1] RFC-1436
Why use type i gophermaps for things like this phlog? It makes it
easy to link to things, like the RFC above. I could drop in
a gopher URL instead, but wait... those didn't exist when RFC-1436
came out either. So should I instead list a selector, server, and
port? Oh, I better indicate a type as well. No, that's silly. Even
though the URL scheme came later it's a useful convention. It
makes it easier for other people. See where I'm going?
So why NOT use type i in this way? Well, two reasons. First, it's
harder to lay out. Working in gophermaps is nasty business.
I wrote a tool[2] to do it for me. Without that I wouldn't do it.
It's easy to screw up and awful to edit later. Easier just to
write plain text, and plain text is sufficient.
(HTM) [2] Burrow
And the second reason? Very old clients like the original UMN
gopher client don't work well with them.
Thankfully very few people use that client anynmore because it's
pretty janky and has barely been maintained. Last I heard it was
in search of a new maintainer, actually. And these days we have
a wealth of new clients that are simply fantastic. We have the
near-ubiquitous lynx which does a fair job, though notably is
converting to HTML under the hood. But the bitreich community
mentioned earlier has led to the creation of at least two gopher
clients I know of that match that gopher purist philosophy. We
also have VF-1, a lovely python client that inspired a fork for
offline browsing of the whole small internet, and another fork for
gemini. Bombadillo is fun, and there's my most recent favorite,
phetch. Lots of options all with better features and better
handling of gopherspace.
For me, the benifits of being able to link within the documents
outweighs the negatives. The format is subverted with my tooling,
and I don't feel the need to lower my gopher content to an ancient
client when there's so many easy alternatives available.
Third: escape codes
Here's I'll agree partially. gopherspace shouldn't assume terminal
environments. Remember the phone users earlier? Generally speaking
it's safer not to do so. But that being said, some places in
gopher space are not just gopher holes. They're not just phlogs.
They are art installations. They are pushing the boundaries of
what's possible and what's decent because that's what art does.
I am of course thinking primarily of cat's baud.baby[3] here, but
there are some other gems around as well. They blow my mind when
I see what can be created in this long forgotten corner of the
internet.
(DIR) [3] baud.baby
But it's only visible in certain ways! Yeah, that's true. You
might stumble on there and go, "AHH! What a mess!" and miss out on
the awesome. That'd be too bad. If that's the case you should grab
phetch and try again. It's worth it. Maybe not for all of gopher,
but for this particular thing. Keep doing what you're doing, cat.
Gopher is a pretty cool thing. It's got limits that make it
awesome because it forces us to focus on content most of the time.
Those limits aren't the point, though. The place it leads us to
are the point. If we disagree on some of the details getting
there, so be it. After all, this is in UTF-8, not Latin-1 as the
spec calls for which lets me do some great things, like share
music for the shakuhachi[4].
(DIR) [4] Shakuhachi Music Guide