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Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?
- rfurmani 10y agoOh wow, that's a blast to the path. The author also wrote the bucktooth gopher server, and I implemented a new (semi-OO Perl) version of it that supported Gopher+. There was always something very satisfying about Gopher, how it made explicit the structure and categories of the data, leaving the front-end to present it how it pleased.
- quanticle 10y agoI would also note that others may find the name Cameron Kaiser familiar because he's the maintainer of the TenFourFox (Firefox for PPC OSX [1] ) and Classilla (Mozilla for OS9 [2]) projects. [1]: http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ http://www.floodgap.com/software/tenfourfox/ [2]: http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/ http://www.floodgap.com/software/classilla/
- noahlt 10y agoIt's not.
- shultays 10y agoI don't get why this is getting down voted. I heard gopher before but never used it. I have two browsers (firefox and chrome) and gopher links failed on both. So I checked wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Native_Gopher_support https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Native_Gophe... And it is not supported in any of 4 most commonly used browser (except there is an add-on for firefox, you can write an add-on for anything anyway). (Edit: 5 actually, I forgot about Safari) So yeah, Gohper is not relevant now.
- aw3c2 10y agoRelevancy is a measure of subjective scope. Things that are relevant to some might be irrelevant to others. Gopher might not be relevant to society as a whole but to a subset of hackers (hi!). Parent's comment is effortless snark so it deserves any downvote it acquires.
- kodfodrasz 10y agoSomething relevant to a negligible minority is usually expressed as: not relevant. Relevancy is not totally subjective, as we don't live alone in basements, but in a society. Something relevant for the most of the/a society is relevant. Other stuff is called niche, irrelevant, because it has no effect on the life of the society. Nuclear physics interests a handful of people only, yet it is relevant, as society would have problems sustaining its operation without nuclear power. Gopher is interesting for even less people, and it is irrelevant, as society would go on just as well without it. Low processing power need? A 10$ Raspberry Pi packs more power than the notebook I saved for 10 years ago. A link to all known gopher servers? It is, in gopher protocol, which I cannot check as none of my browsers support this. This is what is your definition to relevancy is? Because it is not mine. A webpage written in Nepali is infinitely more relevant to most users, as they can access it, and use everyday tools (like google translate) to have an idea in the page. Gopher is about as relevant as the International Toothpick Collector Association's Annual Report on the Proceedings of Toothpick Size Irregularities.
- rhizome 10y agoI don't think I've ever read anything so passionate about Gopher.
- pointfree 10y agoThe author didn't say "popular" he said "relevant" The current state of software development has huge issues with needless complexity resulting from poorly chosen abstractions. Gopher and IRC make it possible to use any client of your choosing, thus keeping innovation and improvements accessible to anyone with an idea.
- lifthrasiir 10y ago> Gopher and IRC make it possible to use any client of your choosing, thus keeping innovation and improvements accessible to anyone with an idea. I agree to the former and disagree to the latter---they are not correlated. In fact, IRC has demonstrated that it might be hard to adapt to new requirements without breaking many things (no matter it's an existing client, a community or a requirement itself). Today the relevance of IRC is mostly due to the existing community and not due to the technical innovation, and casual users wouldn't benefit from that. I don't know much about Gopher but I haven't seen any counterevidence to this observation.
- rhabarba 10y agoThe new(ish) IRCv3 standard does not break compatibility with existing clients though. If they don't support all of its features, they just have less things displayed.
- lifthrasiir 10y agoI know IRCv3 is in progress, and I wish it to be successful, but frankly speaking this has been done 10 years ago.
- rhabarba 10y agoSome of the more recent IRC clients already support most its new features, including v3.1.
- rev_null 10y agoGopher is way more friendly for the visually impaired than the modern web.
- robin_reala 10y agoIf by friendly you mean ‘irrelevant’. There’s plenty of easy things that developers can do to their sites to make them more accessible that don’t require rewriting them as a gopher site.
- rev_null 10y agoYes. There are things that developers could do to make most web sites better for the visually impaired. But that doesn't mean that most web developers use, or even recognize, these best practices. Gopher, on the other hand, simply only supports textual navigation that is easy to feed to a text-to-speech engine. The developer doesn't need to even think about these issues.
- robin_reala 10y agoRight, but text-to-speech is only half of the problem. Gopher by default just uses plain text with no semantics. Without marking up those documents there’s no way to let users jump around within them. Do you honestly expect a visually impaired user to sit and wait while each document they go to is read out to them in its entirety with no heading structure or ability to navigate within the content?
- rev_null 10y agoI think that argument worked well for the original web. But the HTML spec has accumulated a lot of things to make design easier, but they also make it easier to represent a page without useful semantic structure. You mentioned tables, but there were many years where people were using tables in HTML for formatting instead of just expressing tabular data. So div tags were added. Now people sometimes use divs to represent tabular data. Search is a pretty good way to navigate content, and is simple for raw text. An index is an even better way, and is supported quite well by gopher.
- pointfree 10y agoThe web is like an operating system that you are locked into using. This prevents alternative operating systems such as Plan 9 from ever becoming useful, because building a web browser is such a monumental effort. Even if a decent web browser were built for Plan 9 it would defeat the purpose of using such an alternative OS because the web binds software to content. The web has effectively killed innovation in operating systems. A clean and consistent system will be out of reach as long as this web app nonsense continues.
- foota 10y agoI disagree, while writing a web browser would be significant work, it would likely be on the same order as writing an operating functional enough for people to actually want to use it. Porting a browser would likely take less work even (while still being a significant amount of work). This page talks about what it takes to port webkit to another platform: http://blog.cranksoftware.com/webkit-porting-tips-the-good-the-bad-and-the-ugly/ http://blog.cranksoftware.com/webkit-porting-tips-the-good-t...
- pointfree 10y agoSure you could port webkit to your new OS, but if all the software you use effectively exists only as web apps what would be the point?
- anw 10y agoThe point seems to be you could now use any system you wanted (as long as there is a compliant browser) and not worry if your needed app is supported or has all the features of the Windows/OSX version. This lets you take advantage of whatever benefits your desired system provides you without a change of user experience.
- foota 10y agoI think I understand your argument now. Why do you think browsers as de factor operating systems is wrong? Their programming interface is highly standardized across implementations.
- TheLugal 10y agoGopher might not be popular, and apparently it's relevancy is disputed. But it is still an interesting bit of internet-history. It still has an active community, and a whole lot of information. There's also a slow movement to add gopherholes to the tor network. A list of the current known ones can be found here; http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://bitreich.org:70/1/lawn/onion http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://bitreich.org:7...
- rhabarba 10y agoGopher comes without the multimedia annoyances of the over-engineered Web and it "lacks" people whose business model is to be on it. I like to browse Gopher every now and then. Several people I know even export read-only versions of their blog to Gopher. I planned to write a new Gopher app for Android a while ago but I haven't finished it yet. This article reminds me to try again. Thanks.
- spc476 10y agoI "ported" my blog to gopher as well (gopher://gopher.conman.org/) but it's not a clean port. The gopher client I use (an extension to Firefox) is not UTF-8 aware and thus there are character set issues. Also, there's some loss from the conversion of HTML to plain text (compare gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2017/02/27.1 with http://boston.conman.org/2017/02/27.1 http://boston.conman.org/2017/02/27.1). But it wasn't that difficult to do. And yes, I do see a few people hitting the gopher site.
- draven 10y agoI just tested your blog with OverbiteFF (I guess that's the client you're using), and I had to manually switch the encoding to Unicode (View->Text Encoding.) I see there's an "item type" field in the protocol, it's set to 0 (ie "plain text file") for your blog entries. The protocol doesn't seem to offer anything to specify the encoding to the client, so overbite must default to something like plain ascii.
- NoGravitas 10y agoIs there an existing gopher client for Android? I couldn't find one on the Play store, but that could be because of search problems.
- rhabarba 10y agoYes, the Floodgap guy has its own Android client available on his website. Sadly, it follows the design conventions from Android 1.5 or so. http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/
- zaphos 10y agoI had no idea what Gopher was and looked it up to understand; this article was helpful: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/11/the-web-may-have-won-but-gopher-tunnels-on/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2009/11/the-web-may-have...
- hasa 10y agoI used Gopher 1993 in university, but I don't see it relevant today. It's history.
- nvarsj 10y agoThis made me laugh: gopher://gopher.frog.tips/0/JOB_OPENINGS
- Entangled 10y agoBrowsers won't process that request, so for the uninitiated like me: $ curl gopher://gopher.frog.tips/0/JOB_OPENINGS * My first ever gopher interaction.
- NoGravitas 10y agoOr: http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://gopher.frog.tips:70/0/JOB_OPENINGS http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw?gopher://gopher.frog.ti...
- basscomm 10y agoI'm using Lynx, which understood that request just fine.
- jankotek 10y agoAt the time of Facebook, the question should be: Is the web still relevant?
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- beaconstudios 10y agoI'm sure people were asking that when web portals like go.com were becoming dominant, and they'll be asking it long after facebook is dead.
- olavk 10y agoI don't get this. It seems to me Gopher basically supports a subset of what is available on the web. All the benefits of Gopher (low bandwidth requirements, no flashy design or interactivity, strict hierarchical navigation etc.) can also be achieved with stripped-down web pages. I see no benefit at all to having a separate protocol. Gopher is cool as a slice of history though.
- rikkus 10y ago"All the benefits of Gopher [...] can also be achieved with stripped-down web pages" Can be achieved, but aren't. I'd love a consistent, stripped-down interface. The web doesn't give me this (it doesn't matter if it _could_).
- simonh 10y agoAs a client you have no control over this though, because you can't make people provide services using Gopher instead of HTTP. To put it another way, for someone wanting to provide a service it's daft to choose Gopher 'because it's lightweight'. If you're providing the service, nobody can stop you providing a lightweight HTTP service and in fact doing so is mind numbingly easy. Just do it. Or provide a URL link to an FTP server. Gopher was basically just a nicer to use menu based alternative to ftp, but visual browser ftp clients are pretty much that now anyway. Having said all that, it is kind of cool that Gopher is still around. I was using it years before HTTP even existed. If Gopher is going to exits then yes, being lightweight is one of it's strengths, but pretending that this meaningfully distinguishes it from HTTP doesn't strike me as a very strong argument. I suspect a lot of it's attraction is techie cultural exclusivity and contrariness. Not that I have anything against those things whatsoever.
- ramblerman 10y ago> The web doesn't give me this (it doesn't matter if it _could_). If it was important then the web would cater to it. It's simple economics. We could create protocols for all the sub needs and desires that people may have but that would be restrictive.
- digi_owl 10y agoOn that note, i seem to recall reading that Fidonet is still being maintained.
- mydeardiary 10y agoGopher doesn't support encryption. There is no standard for gopher over tls. This makes gopher irrelevant for encrypted communications. But what makes it great: gopher is simple. You can use curl or even netcat for browsing gopher sites.