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Notes on using Lynx to convert gopher sites to HTML
March 29th, 2018
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The lynx browser can be used to very quickly convert a gopher resource
into almost-valid HTML, like so:
lynx -anonymous -dump -source gopher://some.gopher.server/1/selector
The HTML it outputs will not have an SGML/HTML DOCTYPE declared, will
use relative URLs, and will likely have some obscure and poorly
supported HTML elements (such as ISINDEX) if you are using it to
access a CSO (gophertype 2) or gopher index (gophertype 7)...
You can cure most of these HTML woes by using HTML tidy.
Looking closer at the HTML that lynx spits out, it looks like it could
easily pass for HTML 2.0, 3.*, 4.*, or even ISO/IEC 15445:2000...
With that in mind, I often find myself doing something such as:
printf '%s\15\12' '<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN"' \
'"http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">'
lynx -anonymous -dump -source gopher://some.gopher.server/1/selector | \
tidy -n --doctype omit --show-errors 0 --quiet 1
This generates some darn good HTML that will render quicky and won't
trigger quirks mode in modern browsers.
Another thing about the HTML that lynx generates from gopher URLs, it
looks a lot like the old Netscape 2.0 gopher listings, except for it
has a text prefix instead of an icon:
(HTML) for gophertype h - HTML or H - CHTML, not sure about this one
(TEL) for gophertype 8 - telnet
(3270) for gophertype T - telnet 3270
(FILE) for gophertype 0 - text
(DIR) for gophertype 1 - gopher menu
(CSO) for gophertype 2 - CCSO nameserver, email/phone lookup
(BIN) for gophertype 5 - PC binary or 9 - binary
(UUE) for gophertype 6 - uuencoded file (typically a saved email)
(?) for gophertype 7 - searchable gopher index
(IMG) for gophertype g - gif or I - image or : (image from gopher+)
(SND) for gophertype s - sound file or < - sound file (from gopher+)
(HQX) for gophertype 4 - BinHex4 encoded file (from oldworld mac?)
(MIME) for gophertype m - base64 encoded file (saved email??)
(MOV) for gophertype ; - movie (from gopher+)
(PDF) for gophertype P - for ISO 32000-2 document (PDF file)
(UNKN) for gophertypes that lynx does not know about
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