From: gopher-bounce@complete.org Date: Mon Aug 4 20:32:01 2008 Subject: [gopher] Re: Gopherness Jay Nemrow wrote: > "Updated" nostalgia is not nostalgia at all. Sure, but an improved Gopher could have practical uses. I think, perhaps, it might be a better idea to start from nearly scratch and create a new protocol that takes the best ideas from Gopher (the simplicity of the client! the structured layout!) and add and modifies features that we feel would be useful (Replace the limited item type system with something based on MIME types (which has the useful fallback of "display unknown text/* types as text, everything else unknown should be treated as application/octet-stream"), sending some metadata in the response, perhaps define a way to send requests with data). This is different than extending Gopher in that we DON'T worry about backwards compatibility - at least, not on the protocol level. Servers that speak both Gopher and Comepher (or another bad pun, since those seem to be inevitable) would be a Good Thing.