Date: Sat, 23 Aug 2003 15:15:47 -0500
From: John Goerzen <jgoerzen@complete.org>
To: gopher@complete.org
Subject: [gopher] PyGopherd 2.0 released; Gopher and WAP
Message-ID: <20030823201547.GA5036@complete.org>
Mime-Version: 1.0
Content-type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline
User-Agent: Mutt/1.5.4i
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Sender: gopher-bounce@complete.org
Errors-to: gopher-bounce@complete.org
Precedence: bulk
Reply-to: gopher@complete.org

Hello,

Today, I have released PyGopherd 2.0.  I have been running the 1.99.x tree
long enough to consider it stable.

Additionally, there is the debut of a major new feature: the WAP protocol.

WAP is a system of accessing the web from mobile phones and is an
international standard.  Pretty much any mobile phone with "web" capability
supports WAP.  WAP lends itself nicely to hierarchical information, and
thus, to Gopher.

To that end, PyGopherd now has built-in WAP support.  If you enable the WAP
protocol in your config file, you get WAP support for free, *including
forms*.  As an example, you can point your WAP-enabled phone to:

http://quux.org:70/wap

WAP clients are first-class Gopher citizens and have access to everything
that any other client would.  For newer mobile phones that also support
HTML, you can seamlessly access HTML resources and links to other WAP and
non-WAP sites.

At the moment, inter-site linking between PyGopherd sites running WAP is not
supported in the generic case (that is, a selector pointing to a different
gopher server will still yield a gopher URL, but you can add
URL:http://www.somehost.com/wap to a special WAP menu).  This may be added
later.

As a side bonus, the WAP protocol also converts text/plain files on-the-fly
to WML files (gopher menus are also rendered in WML), so you have a simple
platform for presenting data to mobile phone users without learning WML --
AND without breaking regular browsers.

Abstracts, information, 'i' types, etc. are rendered in the usual way on WAP
phones.

Let me know your comments!

PyGopherd is available from http://quux.org:70/devel/gopher/pygopherd or
gopher://quux.org/1/devel/gopher/pygopherd.

-- John