3 or 4 days ago, leeb and I were chatting in irc, I mentionned how I
was considering writing my own gopher client and I poked fun at how half of
the people around here seem to hand-roll their own tools.

Clearly[1], that was a mistake :p
I think it's pretty revealing of how utilitarian the protocol is that so
many people can decide they're gonna write a client, no matter how
small, and actually end up with something worth showing to other people.

People have been discussing the concepts of Small Internet and Large
Internet lately -- there are way too many relevant posts to link them
and I'm sure you've seen at least some of them --.
I'm fairly confident everybody agrees that the protocol should not be
messed with, as its limitations virtually guarantee that no one will be
able to force something on us, especially not the hellish mess we're all
trying to avoid and the language that powers most of it -- not that I 
blame Eich, javascript feels like a dodgy 4am hack because *it is* a 4am
hack produced under duress --.

Cleber mentionned working on his own protocol, and reading his phlog[2]
it seems doubtful he would want to implement anything even resembling
the Large Internet, yet one has to wonder what could be done nowadays
to improve the experience of the typical user of gopher or of any similarly
restricted protocol.

I've been thinking about a bunch of clientside hacks -- most of them
detailed in a file that will eventually find its way into the `Oh God
what am I doing` section of this phlog. -- to try and alleviate some of
the issues inherent to monochrome, monospaced text, but something worth
mentioning happened yesterday :
shortly before posting about gophed on the bbs, KatolaZ linked to the
personal website[3] of the author of edbrowse[4], who happens to be
legally blind.
So, too lazy to grab my mouse and copy/paste the link into firefox, I
summoned zalgo ---- I mean I used tmux to copy/paste the link into
another window and fired up w3m.

Guess what. There's already a protocol meant to handle text, and more 
importantly text formatting. It's so rare for me to see a page render 
properly in w3m that I'd forgotten that html is a markup language.

Back to the drawing board, but this time I'm gonna keep an axe handy.




[1] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/0/~leeb/phlog/2019-01-23_Gopher-and-the-Jedi
[2] gopher://republic.circumlunar.space:70/1/~cleber/phlog
[3] http://eklhad.net/philosophy.html
[4] http://edbrowse.org/