What you write is what you get
------------------------------
Gopher, like WWW and Gemini, is a protocol to publish
your writings.
Gopher is the only protocol where what you write is what
you get.
There is no renderer doing any formatting. Most Gopher
clients don't touch the formatting and show the lines
from the retrieved fill just verbatim.
Gopher is most direct
---------------------
Because of the verbatim display, the Gopher protocol
leads to the most direct relation between the writer and
the reader. Nothing comes between them, nothing changes
the layout that the writer has put into the text file.
Brilliant gophermaps
--------------------
In my opinion, the most brilliant thing the original
developers of Gopher came up with, is the format of the
gophermap.
To understand this, we have to go back in time.
At the time Gopher was developed, there were no
hyperlinks for files on the network. There had been
several implementations of hyperlinks between documents,
like in Hypercard, but as far as I know, those were for
local documents only.
The brilliance of the gophermap, is that there is no
difference in a link to a local file and a link to a file
on a remote server. For the user, it is all
transparent. You can't even see to which server a link
points.
Plain text is first class citizen
---------------------------------
In Gopher, the plain text file is the first class citizen.
This is not that remarkable, at the time of the
development of Gopher, plain text files were the most
common thing.
In hindsight this is a great feature. Plain text is what
makes Gopher what it is. It allows for the direct,
verbatim presentation in the Gopher client as discussed
above.
Plain text is not esoteric. It requires no special
knowledge, everybody can type plain text. Gemtext,
although simple, has to be learned. And certainly writing
HTML requires special knowledge.
Of course this has some drawbacks. Not everybody
understands that it is better to keep the lines
short. And not every language can be used, because of the
limited character set that is supported by the Gopher
protocol.
Gopher is simple
----------------
The Gopher protocol is simple, so a Gopher server can be
simple too.
Also a Gopher client can be very simple too.
In the most simplest form, netcat (nc) can be used as
a Gopher client.
Gopher is fast
--------------
Gopher files tend to be small, certainly on phlogs.
As we have seen, the Gopher protocol leads to the most
direct relation between server and client.
The server is simple and the protocol is simple, there is
hardly any negotiation between the server and the client.
This all makes Gopher blazing fast.
Gopher is not broken
--------------------
Gopher came into being just before the WWW.
We all know that the web is broken.
I remember the early days of the web, it started with
some universities and personal websites. I remember the
angry postings on the mailing lists when the first
corporations started a website.
Things have changed. I didn't understand that anger at
that time. It was before Javascript, before surveillance
marketing, and even before Google.
Gopher has remained the same.
Gopher still gives a verbatim copy of the files you
retrieve.
What is different, as far as I remember, is that we now
have a lot of personal Gopher holes. I don't remember
there were that much personal Gopher holes at that time,
Gopher is not evil
------------------
Gopher doesn't have any of the evil things we see in the
web. No Javascript, no surveillance marketing, and so on.
This mirrors to the content and to the way it is used.
Gopher leads to what is sometimes called a smol community
or a smol web.
I haven't seen any hate in the Gopher sphere, people are
kind and open.
Gopher Rocks
------------
It is a joy to go through the Gopher sphere, reading phlogs.
Gopher is easy, it is fast and the people are kind.
