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Title: Re: The state of gopher
Date: February 08, 2024
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So, I saw Mr_Tea's post on "The state of gopher"[00], read tomasino's
reply[01] and tfurrows' reply[02], and I have to say, it felt a lot nicer to
see this sort of actual discussion, instead of what I've become accustomed to
elsewhere. That said, I have a few thoughts on what's been written.
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First of all, the thought of standards and adhering to them. The problem with
RFC1436[03]--a document I've read in its entirety--is that it never received an
update to keep up with modern conventions. Many standards receive updated RFCs,
but Gopher never did.
Mr_Tea's argument of line length is based off of section 3.9 of the RFC for
display strings, which is a fair point. But as has been pointed out, that only
applies to gophermaps, searches, and directory listings. I rarely see any of
those exceeding 80 characters, outside of phlogs that use gophermaps for a more
interactive experience.
If Mr_Tea were actually complaining about plaintext files going beyond 70 or
80 characters, I'm not sure why RFC1436 is being used as justification for that
idea. I actually went back and read through the RFC just to make sure I wasn't
missing anything, and no, there's nothing about the display of text files. Just
for "user display strings", which are what gophermaps use.
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On the subject of gophermaps being used for content...I partially have to
agree there. With older platforms that don't have a client that knows about
type-i content, and with some applications like Mozilla Suite 1.7.x [^00], the
content itself just isn't shown. It's like going to a modern website to get a
bit of information, and being told that my browser is too old for the JS that
their framework uses to display basic HTML. And being told I need another
is kinda like a website saying "You need Chrome to view this page."
Likewise with escape codes. There are gopherholes I can't read at all in lynx
because of the mass of text codes, and Netscape 9 just goes weird at times from
it.
But like I said, I only /partially/ agree. My view is "to each their own,"
and if you want to do weird things with your own space, you should be allowed
to do so without fear of retribution[^01]. It's *your* space, after all. Do
what you want, because others aren't forced to view (or at least attempt to
view) your work. Like the web, graceful degradation is a nicety to offer if
you're able to do so, but it's not a hard requirement.
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I'd like to end off with one more comment. The final paragraph from Mr_Tea's
post is as follows:
> The saddest part for me is that many of these individuals appear to
> be in IT or technical disciplines and have some proficiency.
> Unfortunately they choose either not to read the RFC, blatantly
> ignore it, or adhere to best practice. Don't be that person ...
To that, I say this: please don't be "that person". That person who looks
down on others for being themselves, instead of living up to your own personal
expectations. Doing so makes you come off as a gatekeeper for the community.
We don't need that. We don't need what happened with Gemini to suddenly start
happening with gopher as well.
Everyone is different. Everyone has their preferences. Everyone has their own
standards. Try to be welcoming, to be accepting (within reason), to not to be
so judgmental over someone else's space not being up to your own personal
standards.
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Links:
[00]:
gopher://gopher.icu/0/phlog/Computing/The-state-of-gopher.md
[01]:
gopher://gopher.black/1/phlog/20240205-re-the-state-of-gopher
[02]:
gopher://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/0/~tfurrows/phlog/2024-02-07_reStateofGopher.txt
[03]:
gopher://gopher.32kb.net:70/0/rfc/rfc1436.txt
Footnotes:
[^00]: As an aside, I use Netscape 9 on MacOs 10.6.8 to dig through gopherspace
most of the time. It displays i-type content just fine. Mozilla Suite
and SeaMonkey (when it supported gopher) don't display it at all. It's
something I find kinda sad, but maybe I can fix that on my end at some
point as a boredom project.
[^01]: The "Amphora incident" involving Drew DeVault comes to mind. While
DeVault was acting in an unacceptable manner toward the Amphora devs in
regards to them "adding favicon.txt support" to their Gemini browser,
him refusing connections from users was a completely valid move. He just
didn't need to go on a powertrip over it.
