Welcome to my gopher hole
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Date: 2010-05-02 02:40:21 EDT


1 Gopher hole: Another evening experiment 
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The SDF user list (hmm, how do I insert a link in an SDF document?)
seems littered with tiny little gopher holes, of people like me who
got intrigued by "gopher" and had to have a try.

But gopher:// does seem to hint at a dream of a Perfect, almost Platonic
Internet, a vision as seductive, in its way, as Ted's Xanadu (man, it's
quite annoying not to be able to link easily).

For an hour or two, it seems like, wow, this could really work.

Then it starts to get depressing, how many links are broken.

And how you can only ever see one thing at a time---/a/ picture, /a/
document.

It's lovely and bookish and fun, and if people were using org-mode to
manage the text, maybe it would be easy to use.

But what about color? Color makes plain text so much easier to read.
Highlighting key words. Sure, you're on the first step of the horrid
road to Web madness, but on the other hand, we can illuminate our 
manuscripts again, so let's do it.

Still the consistent user interface---that's something. I wonder if
the "users" I love would find a gopher page easy or frightening or
what.

2 But, you can include HTML files 
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And CGI files, and all kinds of stuff.

So ... does it just come down to separating "menus" and "content"?

But ... content is supposed to by hyperlinked.

Maybe, gopher means you always have a sitemap. Period.

But, a hierarchical filesystem model isn't the only way to get to
data.

HTTP should offer all these other ways to get to the data, while also
a sitemap.

I guess the gopher relevance article (no link, sorry) is right, that gopher
/requires/ this menu interface.

But not really, since you can serve up HTML. Pooh.

3 Do you really need a whole different protocol just to serve your data as a filesystem? 
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Nope. Just don't have an index file. :) Firefox will happily show an ugly list.

Granted, a default gophermap is pretty cool; when gopher does have
links, the syntax is much nicer than HTML links.

But what's the first thing everyone does? Use Figlet to make a distinctive "graphic"
on their gophermap.