* <<HA6.1411>> Gopher Nav Is Killer
I always start browsing Gopher sites with a niggling little feeling
in the back of my head that the interface isn't that good, that
stacks of pages of single-column text is not at all optimal for site
navigation, that tabs/multiple windows must be better, right?
Parallelism over serialism!

But I'm wrong! And I'm wrong because navigating Gopher sites is FAST.
Damned-near instantaneous. It boggles the mind, the speed with which
I can rip through documents and sites in Lynx or any other
console-mode Gopher client.

We navigate Gopher sites as though each page is a room, and there's
at least one door back to the room you came from, and any number of
additional doors into other rooms. It's an arbitrarily deep tree
structure, but from the user's perspective it abstracts to the
room-and-doors spatial metaphor quite naturally. Navigating the Web
can be thought of in the same way, really. In early Web days, it felt
very much the same, although there was always one difference: in
Gopher, you can always go "up" to an index; on the Web, there is no
"up".

So, navigating a tree structure is, really, very natural for most
people, and when you can do it almost as fast as you can press the
keys, man... surfing Gopher is heaven compared to the Web.

--
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©2017 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR) <[email protected]>

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