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I did a hackday project where I wrote a script that converted our intranet at work into a gopher site. Before I started, I was really enthused about it, but onc
by jboy55 8y ago
I did a hackday project where I wrote a script that converted our intranet at work into a gopher site. Before I started, I was really enthused about it, but once I started, it just became evident how much a kludge these early protocols were.
Its the COBOL of page description languages. Its truly horrible, its not like HTML was just this minor improvement, its a complete conceptual shift. GOPHER is just a tab delimitated file, so excel is the best editor for it.
The first character is the type of thing, it can be a submenu (1), a text doc(0), a gif (g), an image (I), a binary file (b), a bin-hex file (4) or it can tell you the name of a mirror server so you can load balance?? (+).
How do you take form input like a a street address? You can't, its one way data transfer.
- classichasclass 8y agoItem type 7 is how you handle queries, and how things like Veronica were implemented, so it's not one way. It's definitely constrained, but not impossible. There was also item type 2 for CSO, though that is much less common. Gopher+ had ASK forms which were much like HTML form controls but were, like much of Gopher+, complex to implement and not widely adopted. Some recent clients and servers support arguments over stdin like POST requests, but this too is not widely implemented.
- jboy55 8y agoMost of these tools like Archie and Veronica seemed like magical services when I started cruzing the internet. I recently learned that Archie when it started was nothing more than a collection of `ls -lR`s of various ftp servers that would be searched with grep. Which, in hindsite, was the obvious unixy way of doing it.