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To: gopher@complete.org
Subject: [gopher] Re: Gopher thoughts
References: <3C4493E0.D60E4C67@sympatico.ca>
From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
Date: Wed, 16 Jan 2002 10:30:50 -0500
In-Reply-To: <3C4493E0.D60E4C67@sympatico.ca> (Ralph Furmaniak's message of
 "Tue, 15 Jan 2002 15:41:04 -0500")
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Ralph,

Thanks for your most intersting message.  I am glad to see someone
thinking in the future about what innovations could be achieved
through gopher!

Ralph Furmaniak <sugaku@sympatico.ca> writes:

> WYSIWYG is the enemy!  Basically, a professionally designed gopher
> should not on first glance appear much different from a recreational
> one.

I like that.  Of course, some people (myself included) could use some
help on nice organization.  I'm working on it, but hey, it's not there
yet!

> Many people think of gopher as a way to send text files in a text
> manner, and is hence outdated in the age of graphical windowing
> systems.  My idea for this would be the introduction of "themed

I think of gopher as a global filesystem.  Let's imagine that someone
gets around to writing a gopherfs...

  *** shimmering and dreamy music ***

  cd /gopher/quux.org
  cat "About This Server"             # displays local file
  cd Software/Gopher
  ls -l                               # shows local and remote files
  cat "Intro.txt"                     # a file from floodgap.com
  cat "info.txt"                      # a file from quux.org

etc.  Nothing else can do this.  Not WebDAV, not FTP, not NFS.  It's
so cool to me -- I think of it as "mounting the planet."  I hope to
get some of the technical issues of writing a "gopherfs" module
resolved so this can actually become a reality.  Already we have
kio_gopher for KDE and a vfs module for Gnome (see earlier post in
this list) doing this sort of thing.  I haven't seen the Gnome module
yet.  KDE's shows a lot of promise but is unfortunately buggy.

> clients".  Basically, the beauty of Gopher lies in its straightforward
> uniform presentation, but (for the uncouth masses who do not appreciate
> such beauty <g>) once this data is sent, it does not have to remain like

So, I think that the beauty of gopher is network-transparency.  It's a
buzzword you hear a lot these days, referring to things like
databases, terminal servers, etc.  But gopher really *DOES* network
transparency.  If you use a browser like UMN gopher, which is probably
the closest we have to a real filesystem presentation, what you see is
essentially a large global filesystem.