From: Ralph Furmaniak <sugaku@sympatico.ca>
To: gopher@complete.org
Subject: [gopher] Re: Pygopherd nearing gopherd replacement
Date: Fri, 5 Apr 2002 13:58:38 EST
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> Well, unless you pass the character to the executable, how does it 
> help?  If you pass it to the executable, you might as well just use 
> something else.

The executable already knows what it will return, and the person making the menu knows what it will return.  Suppose you have script 'foo' that reads an archive and displays a menu.  You also have a script 'bar' which just serves files from the archive.  Suppose the server does not receive the character.  If it just prints the results, then gopher+ and http browsers cannot access foo.  If it automaticlly formats it, bar will look strange or be corrupted.

You could of course have the script examine the gophermap,link,cap files to determine the type, but this makes things more complicated especially if 'foo' and 'bar' are one and the same script.  It is especially more complicated if the original menu was itself a script.

This is not a problem in umn gopherd, since it automatically assumes that executables are text/plain.