I know as a lisp person that this is not something you are meant to
try and do. But I think we can summarise some obvious advantages of
gopher. Gopher <is not="xml"></is>, better yet, it's not broken, inc
onsistent xml used to house two scrappy scripting languages of ill i
ntent. Gopher is highly regularly structured, and not mutating over
time. Curl almost makes a fine gopher browser on its own, as has bee
n pointed out.
A controversial strength is the absense of an https from gopher ; en
crypted connections are outside the scope of the RFC. This is an adv
antage in that gopher doesn't have an aging encryption standard, and
its encryption isn't hijacked for other purposes. (https deliberate
ly confuses the independent usage of encrypted connections with veri
fying your domain with an arbitrary authority, and then displaying c
onfusing messages about people using encryption without participatin
g in such).
The strength of gopher can be seen in convergent evolution of commer
cial standards - twitter text sharing, facebook posts, probably othe
r things - away from having the poster write a Web Application and t
o be basically text and file attachments. The fact that the most pop
ular web services offer an experience similar to using gopher, witho
ut the web service leans in favour of gopher.
Gopher's natural tree structure, a la the familiar filesystems, is a
beautiful advantage.
If you know of or have better thoughts, I am happy to hear at screwt
ape at sdf dot org.
