Gopher is the ancestor of HTTP. It was developed at the University of Minnesota in 1991 back when the World Wide Web was barely beginning to gain momentum, but was ultimately overwhelmed by HTTP. Gopher content is organized as a simple directory tree. Each directory can contain files of any kind and, optionally, a special gophermap file which is used to add custom messages or items. This structure makes it extremely easy and consistent to navigate, and because it's plaintext only, the services and content hosted on it do not rely on any graphical features, which makes it very lightweight to browse even on low-end machines. The plain text-ness also makes it nice and compact to read, unlike HTML layouts which are entirely up to the web designers. Because of these strengths, many enthusiasts such as me still use it, and even prefer it to the modern web. I personally think browsers should not be an entire OS, and anything more complicated than a static plain text page should be a dedicated app instead of a web app. (DIR) .. (DIR) 0_README_how_to_browse 2016-Nov-11 17:49 - (DIR) escaping_special_chars 2016-Nov-10 22:55 -