From: gopher-bounce@complete.org Date: Mon Aug 4 20:31:29 2008 Subject: [gopher] Re: Item Type Suggestions This is getting tiring for me and I really hope it is for other people. We need to establish our standards soon or we will be getting the same divergence for eternity. It sounds like we are still wrestling over a very basic idea - do we care to if we abandon gopher0 and break older clients? Kyevan seems to be voting to do away with the old stuff and pursue a new course. If we are to move forward, we need to decide if we are honoring gopher0 as it stands or not. If we are not going to worry about backward-compatibility, why are we even using Gopher as a base? Throw it out and redesign a new protocol that makes sense given modern realities. I think I understand why many people would rather just jack-up gopher instead of admitting that they are building something new - gopher already has a presence (a very weak one) and something new would have to build a new audience. It is easier to simply hijack the tiny gopher audience and make them do upgrades. I am not going there and anyone else who respects any kind of netiquette should not be going there either. I will head off an accusation now, though I know people will fling it anyway - I am not against adding new functionality to gopher servers and clients! What I am against is essentially breaking gopher (especially older clients) to get this new functionality. Gopher has ways to add new abilities that don't break old things. We need to stick with that if we are interested in gopher at all. In respect of those of us that don't want to break the backward path, I say the rest of you should find yourselves a new name, get yourselves a new port assignment, and leave port 70 and gopher be. I am getting the impression that a lot of people are just looking to take the real estate that is port 70, usurping what little audience it has left, and telling the gopher protocol people to basically get lost. Here is my response: Find your own protocol port/name and quit trying to steal gopher's. On Sat, Aug 2, 2008 at 7:18 PM, Kyevan <kyevan@sinedev.org> wrote: > What about the whole world of text-based formats? (text/*)? > > I think it might make most sense to put text/* under 1, application/* > under 9, image/* under I, and audio/* under s. > > As a practical matter, for the moment, it might be easiest to just > prohibit message/* and multipart/*, since the only use I can see > gopher-wise would be multipart/appledouble, and there it makes more > sense to use binhex and item type 4. example/* and */example are > entirely invalid (outside documentation), of course! > > video/* and model/* could be either shoved under 9, or we could define > item types for them. Having item types that parallel the base Internet > media types seems like it would make sense and would ease conversion... > but would possibly break compatibility with older clients. Actually, I > and s have that problem too, though they're wide-spread enough to be > mentioned on Wikipedia (which, admittedly, could just be one editor > using them...) > > Add fallback types to the hypothetical pie-in-the-sky Gopher Perfect > that will be specified around the same time as all that vaporware we've > been 'promised' over the years comes out, I guess. :P > > Additionaly, might we want to use something like > application/[X-]gopher-menu as a type for 0? I mean, it seems like it > would be nice to have SOMETHING to put in a MIME type-related field for > menus, if for no other reason than to look nicer to humans reading the > menu... and besides, then you could do stupid things like return gopher > menus over http :P > > -- Kyevan > > Jay Nemrow wrote: >> Also, if we are to deal with mime types at all, I am thinking that all >> of them must be put under the 9 item type, no matter what, just to >> keep old clients from breaking. If you put a .doc file under the 0 >> menu type, the old client wants to dump that to screen as text and you >> will see gibberish and probably crash things. Everything that doesn't >> fit into the established types will have to be 9 item types, as far as >> I can see. > > >