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                  Adding redirection to the gopher protocol

The primary gopher protocol specification [1] is totally mum on the topic of
errors. The word “error” only occurs once and that just to note that the
gopher type “3” is an error. So given the lack of specification, I thought I
might do an experiment and see if I can't introduce the concept of
“redirection” to the gopher protocol. It can hardly be thought of violating
both the spirit and letter of the spec [2] if there's nothing in the spec to
figuratively or literally violate.

Upon encoutering some form of error, say, a nonexistent selector, a gopher
server is supposed to return an “error selector” that looks something like:

-----[ data ]-----
3'/Phlog:' doesn't exist!HTHTerror.hostHT1CRLF
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----

What I'm doing is giving some structure to the “error selector.” The text
portion (the bit right after the “3” and before the first tab character) will
be a fixed string giving the actual error, So for a nonexistent selector, my
gopher server [3] will return:

-----[ data ]-----
3Not foundHT/Phlog:HTgopher.conman.orgHT70CRLF
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----

The text portion will always be “Not found” with the nonexistent selector
being returned along with the hostname and port. Now, for a redirection [4],
it will return

-----[ data ]-----
3Permanent redirectHTPhlog:HTgopher.conman.orgHT70CRLF
-----[ END OF LINE ]-----

The text portion will always be “Permanent redirect” with the new selector
being given, along with the host and port number. Doing this will allow me to
even redirect a request to another gopher server. Well, as long as the gopher
client understands the error text.

Using literal text strings like this isn't ideal, but it doesn't break
existing clients and does give enough information in case someone sees the
error (and that they speak English—which is why this isn't ideal). Also, if
the number of possible errors is kept small, then explicitly checking each
string isn't that much of an issue.

I can only hope other gopher servers pick up on the idea and make gopher
space a little bit less annoying to use.

[1] https://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1436.txt
[2] http://verisimilitudes.net/2019-07-07
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org:70/1
[4] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2019/09/30.3

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