Tuesday, November 28th, 2017

       Why does this gopher hole look different?
       ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

I  decided to  simplify  all  menus on my  gopher. As I  was  browsing
through  gopherspace  last  weekend, I  have  found  many  interesting
documents  regarding gopher menu design back from the era, when gopher
was new and  promising. I  always knew, that the whole idea of  gopher
was a system of  interconnected online menus to access remote  content
the way user is used to do  locally, but I  never  thought about it in
depth.

This weekend I tried several MS-DOS based gopher clients and I have to
say, my root menu was a  mess[1]. My mind is  seriously  crippled from
world-wide-web and  that  made me  create my  gopher as  some  sort of
text-only web. It's not  supposed to be like this. It's supposed to be
a menu. Menu with self-descriptive items, pointing to content and that
content should be in appropriate form, i.e. text content in text files
and not  another  gopher  map/menu - if not  for  other  reasons, then
because the "i"  menu-type is not official.

So I  started from  scratch and I think my  top-level menu is now much
more  legible, no  matter the client and I intend to re-do  everything
possible this way. I  probably won't be able to drop the "i" menu item
and I even don't think, that it is  necessary to drop it, because most
clients  display  it  somehow.  But  I'll  try to  use it  only  where
necessary, i.e.  generated  content,  headings etc.  Navigation should
always be  possible and clear  without it. I'd love to have  access to
some  original  unmodified gopher content from 20-23 years ago to see,
how they did it.

[1] http://technomorous.eu/images/minuet_1.png

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