# Responses to Gopher Annoyances

I found several replies to my last post on gopher annoyances [0] in
my recent forays into the gopher-verse. I'd like to reply to them in
turn.

Magical.fish took issue with my assertion that gopher authors should
hard-wrap text [1]. They even said that lynx already wraps text -
but this is only partially true. Lynx does not properly format text,
as much as it will wrap it at whatever width your screen is at, it
does not insert spaces or hyphens to break at word boundaries, so
you end up with a long mess of unreadable text (like his
reply). Sorry, you should hard-wrap your text on gopher. And yes, I
said "should", just like the RFC did. It's still a good idea to
ensure the broadest client support.

SDF user Xiled replied with a nicely formatted post [2], but I'll
note with some irony that it is linked with a type 1 selector,
rather than type 0. In the venerable 'gopher' client the post text
is not displayed, just the links at the bottom of the post, which
was my point about supporting older clients (that said, lynx handles
these just fine). Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that gopher
authors do this so that links can be embedded in the text. However,
to keep compatibility with older clients, you would have to create a
directory for each post and put the content in a gophermap. And this
again was my larger point that gopher is not the web, and we should
stop trying to treat it that way. I'll add that I also use lynx with
the mozz.us proxy to view gemini content.

Prismdragon.net said it best, in their reply [3]:

>Gopher is gopher, the web is the web, and Gemini is Gemini. Let's
>keep them their own things.

Update: 2024-02-04 I came across one more reply from Luxferre [4].

[0]: gopher://gopher.unixlore.net/0/glog/gopher-annoyances.md
[1]: gopher://magical.fish/0/phlog/thoughts-on-text-formatting
[2]: gopher://sdf.org/1/users/xiled/phlog/2021/20210420_gopher_gemini
[3]: gopher://gopher.prismdragon.net/0/phlog/2021/2021-04-21_re_gopher_annoyances.txt
[4]: gopher://hoi.st/0/posts/2023-04-04-to-wrap-or-not-to-wrap.txt