Re: [gopher] What's my IP address in gopher!
On 2012-05-07, Cameron Kaiser wrote:
>> Now for one moment, let's get real. Gopher has been obsolete even
>> before this list was created. Even then it has been and it will ever be
>> an obsolete thing from the past tinkered with by enthusiasts, people
>> who run old gear just for the fun of it. As I can tell the whole gopher
>> community has become so small that nearly everybody who runs a server
>> as well as nearly every user is subscribed to this mailing list.
>
> While I can't argue with that, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to be
> cognizant of how people are using it regardless of its obsolescence.
I guess this depends on your definition of "obsolete". That gopher is
not as widely used as the web, it isn't. I'd also guess it lost most of
its userbase (the people who were using it just because it was a popular
medium back then).
Now, "obsolete" may also mean there's something better or newer. I don't
think that's the case here: even if the web grew in popularity, it's not
exactly gopher++ -- it offers some flexibility, but lacks some of the
points that make gopher strong.
The fact that gopher is not used by default to serve content to cell
phones (not smart phones, although even those would benefit from the
simplicity) is just because whoever could make the choice, chose to make
a new, different protocol and language bundle instead (WAP+WML).
Gopher wasn't obsolete for that, it just wasn't chosen.
> But, i itemtype is quite handy, and makes menus much more serviceable as
> long as it is used judiciously. In Overbite Android, you can certainly
> go landscape to view long strings, and it works pretty well in the iOS
> Gopher client too.
Here, the key probably is to use i to make your menu better but make
sure it's still usable if the i items don't get rendered.
Now the question is really whether showing the result with "i" is a good
idea, as AFAIK it's seen as optional.
It also depends on whether "i" is seen as optional because of backwards
compatibility or so that clients can drop these if they can't afford to
show them.
--
Nuno J. Silva (aka njsg)
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg
http://njsg.sdf-eu.org/
_______________________________________________
Gopher-Project mailing list
Gopher-Project@lists.alioth.debian.org
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/gopher-project
Reply to: