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Why I use Gophermaps | |
July 01st, 2018 | |
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maiki just asked why I use gophermaps for my phlog instead of | |
plain text. I know others at bitreich [0] have commented on the | |
practice with various opinions on why "misusing" gophermaps is | |
bad. Plenty of people on gopher use plain text for their content | |
and I am not going to complain. My choice is a product of style | |
and philosophy. | |
Style: | |
One of the best things about hypertext is the ability to link | |
contextually to relevant content. Gopher is missing this to | |
a degree, but not entirely. We can't link a block of text inline | |
like in HTML but we can link a line. That functionality is | |
entirely limited to gophermaps, though. Without the gophermap the | |
best we can do is include a text link and rely on the client to go | |
above and beyond the protocol to enable interaction (like VF-1 so | |
valiantly does). | |
My choice, stylistically, was to take it upon myself to do | |
a little extra work and build in the links directly into the | |
content by making my phlogs a gophermap. I first announced this | |
change [1] back in October of 2017 when I was still relatively new | |
at this whole thing. In fact, I was piggybacking on the very | |
bare-bones shell scripts that would later become burrow [2]. My | |
first iteration was just a bunch of echo commands to a blank file | |
and then launching vim [3]. These days I have the ability to edit | |
existing phlog entries, generate in plain text or gophermaps, | |
auto-generate RSS, and a bunch of other crap. | |
Philosophy: | |
From what I've seen over my time on gopher the biggest complaint | |
about gophermaps for content isn't about the effort involved in | |
creating them. Instead it's an argument for purity in the | |
protocol. "Don't use the 'i' item type for this sort of thing," | |
they say. "The 'i' type isn't even in RFC 1436!" And it's true. | |
The type isn't defined in 1436, and it definitely isn't pure | |
gopher as envisioned in the two-week sprint that a bunch of guys | |
at the University of Minnesota did as much to stick it to the man | |
(their school beauracracy) as they did to just get something out | |
there for the community to react to. | |
See, I don't see that as something to protect through purity. The | |
mindset of those guys was to iterate, to share, to build, and to | |
make the internet better. They didn't sit for years in planning | |
before deploying the end-all-be-all of protocols. They cobbled | |
together some crap on top of existing tools and made improvements. | |
And that's what type "i" did later. It enabled us to write more | |
description than would fit on one line so there was context to | |
a link. | |
That's what I see myself doing when I phlog. The links below (and | |
now sometimes in-line) are given context by my post. If you're | |
reading and say, "hey, I should check that out!" now you can. You | |
just follow the link and boom, there you are. | |
For those folks who don't bother with it and post in plain text, | |
if I really want to chase down a link I can select it and manually | |
enter it. It's more difficult, but it's doable. I hold no grudge | |
against them for their choice. | |
If you are new to gopher and just want to toss up markdown files | |
that you're also using to generate a web version, go for it. I'll | |
be more happy that you've decided to add content here than | |
anything else. I'm certainly not going to berate your efforts by | |
nit-picking on whether you use type 1 or type 0. | |
[0] bitreich.org | |
[1] New Format Test | |
[2] burrow | |
[0] This is amazeballs |