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I'm 34, I've used gopher, and it's awesome. There is something far more special about publishing files on the Internet and links launching specialized native ap

I'm 34, I've used gopher, and it's awesome. There is something far more special about publishing files on the Internet and links launching specialized native applications, instead of some one-size-fits-all experience that never leaves the browser. We could totally do that with the web, but the masses want their devices to keep getting smarter so they can stay dumber.

bunderbunder 8y ago
There's that angle. The other one I was thinking about is, it's just increasingly difficult for me to think that allowing anonymous third parties to run arbitrary code on your system is a great idea. It's convenient as heck, sure, and it does allow for creating some really interesting tools, but it's also begging for abuse. It reminds of the late '90s fad for embedding a scripting language inside every single document format, and how that ended up being a can of worms. When I hear that it's basically impossible to disable arbitrary auto-playing video alongside the text you planned on reading, because someone will just implement a canvas-based video player in JavaScript, and it turns out you can't disable JavaScript, either, because then the whole page will simply fail to load because Vue.js or whatever can't even fathom the idea of a user-agent that seeks to be something other than a glorified application runtime environment, I think, "Wow, it would appear that HTML has irretrievably ceased to be a hypermedia format, it's now more like Google's answer to XAML. Where can I go to find actual hypermedia?" And the only thing I can think of that fits the bill is (the admittedly relatively primitive) Gopher.