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Quick note on libwww-based browsers and saving gopher listings as HTML
March 31st, 2018
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So, gopher listings can contain just about any text... including text
that looks like HTML, text like <B><U><I>this isn't bold!</I></U></B>..
From what I can see, libwww-based browsers like Lynx, Mosaic, and Net-
scape will display gopher listings containing HTML fragments properly:
as plain text and not rendered HTML...
However, if you save the listing to disk (using lynx -dump for instance)
they all fail to encode the entities for < and > in gopher listing
(<, >)... So if one was to reopen the saved files, the browser
(rightly) will render the HTML that should have been plain text.
This is really a pain in the rear, I need to go put some workarounds
on my gopher to HTTP gateway to deal with this, and also go snoop around
the libwww code in Lynx to see if it can be fixed; really no need to go
upstream straight to libwww itself, because it appears that it is no
longer maintained. Bummer. :(
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