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From: [email protected] ("The Internet Gopher Team" )
Newsgroups: comp.archives
Subject: [comp.infosystems.gopher] Announcing 4 new Gopher+ implimentations
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Date: 1 Aug 1993 07:43:04 GMT
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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Archive-name: auto/comp.infosystems.gopher/Announcing-4-new-Gopher-implimentations

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
We are please to announce 4 new implimentations of the Gopher+ software.

There is now a new Unix server (version 2.0), a new Unix and VMS curses-based
client (version 2.0), a new PC-DOS client (PC Gopher III version 1.10), and a
new Macintosh client (TurboGopher version 1.07).

Gopher+ is an upward-compatible extension of the original Gopher protocol;
old gopher servers are accessible to Gopher+ clients, and old clients can
access information on Gopher+ servers. The Gopher+ extensions allow for

- open-ended definition of item attributes. Items in gopherspace can have
  arbitrary sets of attributes associated with them. Attributes can be
  used to hold information about the server administrator, the version
  of the software being run, or other meta-information that the server
  administrator wishes to associate with a gopher item.

- alternate views of an item in gopherspace while preserving text as
  the lowest common denominator. With Gopher+ alternate views you can
  find out the size, langauge, and format of alternate representations
  of an item, and select the view that best fits you needs. Gopher+ now
  uses MIME content types to name alternate views.

- better binary transfer methods which make it more efficient to move
  binary data such as images, video, and sound.

- ASK blocks to make it possible to solicit structured information from
  users. With a Gopher+ ASK block, a server administrator can define a
  set of prompts and questions to ask the user, then take the users
  responses and feed them to a shell script for further processing.

Because we have moved from using our own naming scheme for gopher+ alternate
views to using MIME content types, we have had to register a large numebr of
MIME content types with IANA and change the mappings in the beta-test versions
of the Macintosh and Unix gopher+ software. If you are using an earlier version
of the gopher software, we urge you to upgrade now to the new release so that
we can make a quick, clean migration to MIME content types for alternate views.

We have been very busy finishing the software we have not had a great
deal of time to put up Gopher+ alternate views of the information on our
servers. Look for this to change over the next week. As of now we are running
gopher+ on all of our servers and distributing Gopher+ clients to our
users at the University of Minnesota.

You can get the current versions of Gopher+ via Gopher by connecting to
gopher.tc.umn.edu port 70, selecting "Information About Gopher" and opening the
"Gopher Software Distribution" -or- via anoymous ftp to boombox.micro.umn.edu
in the /pub/gopher heirarchy.

To report bugs (or send praise) e-mail us at [email protected]

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