From: gopher-bounce@complete.org Date: Mon Aug 4 21:36:07 2008 Subject: [gopher] Re: Gopherness I don't doubt the usefulness of a new gopher-ish protocol especially when compared with Gopher, that was a comparative (to FTP) lightweight when it was created. I don't say that people shouldn't create new things, but to change the protocol means that the old one is gone. Kaput. Old clients will not work anymore (with "updated" servers) and no one is supposed to care that they don't work anymore. Gopher has been somewhat unique because it is still useful in spite of being frozen in time. Ten year old c64 clients still work with gopher servers and you can access a file (if you want to) through gopher. Building clients and servers are a great beginning work in socket programming before you graduate to tougher protocols. I have given these justifications before and I tire of bringing them up time and time again. When you talk to port 70, an internet server expects to converse in Gopher. This is established and has been for years. If you want to speak another protocol, get yourself another port. This is also the established way to handle new protocols that refuse to be backward-compatible with established protocols. If you guys who want an essentially new protocol go off and do that, it hurts no one. gopher continues and whatever work you produce can press forward. If you want your servers to do gopher, your new protocol, and a few others, that is wonderful and great and you have much precedent for your work, as there are gopher/web servers out there. I say, go for it. If you people insist on breaking old gopher clients and servers, you are being destructive and people who prefer the original protocol and like to serve content viewable on 80s era computers will be cut off. Gopher will no longer do that job. I think it would be rather disingenuous to call the new protocol gopher, as it will not be what UMN produced (sounds like it won't work with it, either) and what they named after their mascot. It almost smacks of trademark infringement (though that is probably a stretch) to break the original. My basic question is: Must Gopher0 be destroyed (or broken) for people to find happiness here? Can't you guys make a new name and register a new port assignment along with creating your new gopher-ish protocol? If Avery wants a new mailing list, I propose that it be created with the intent of talking about the "New" gopher. That is always what justified a new mailing list in the past - taking a new direction. On Mon, Aug 4, 2008 at 11:54 AM, Kyevan <kyevan@sinedev.org> wrote: > 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. > > >