Re: [gopher] Updated Gopher RFC
About the mime types and handling of them - I don't really see why gopher should have mimetypes.
If we'll take the simplest possible gopher client - say something on a Tandy T100 (I've got one on WiFi, haven't gotten around coding a gopher client yet) - there's just no way to *ever* show anything else than plain text and menus. No need for mime, or types other than the basic ones.
If we'll step up a little and take a generic Unix console from mid 90's (early Linux etc) then we'll probably run our gopher client as a normal console program (Lynx/UMN gopher etc). The way we handle HTML, audio, video, images etc is to launch an external viewer. With an external viewer we'll only have to know about the basic type of the file; if it's an image we'll probably launch XV, Ghostscript for PS/PDF, XMMS for all audio, video we can forget etc etc. There's really no need for mime as the applications themselves will do content detection *anyway*, and the gopher client itseself couldn't care less.
Yes, I'm conveniently forgetting about /etc/mailcap which uses mime - hands up who actually edited their mailcap to actually *work*?
Stepping up to modern days, browsers these days don't care about mime, at all. It's a blessing and a curse at the same time (mostly because IE does a different thing than Firefox which almost but not quite works like Webkit). Again, no need for mime since *everything* is content-sniffed... Again, hands up those who know what mimetype your webserver uses for CSS (most webservers get it wrong and it still manages to work).
- Kim
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