Gopher is the ancestor of HTTP. It was developed at the University | |
of Minnesota in 1991 back when the World Wide Web was barely | |
beginning to gain momentum, but was ultimately overwhelmed by HTTP. | |
Gopher content is organized as a simple directory tree. Each | |
directory can contain files of any kind and, optionally, a special | |
gophermap file which is used to add custom messages or items. | |
This structure makes it extremely easy and consistent to navigate, | |
and because it's plaintext only, the services and content hosted on | |
it do not rely on any graphical features, which makes it very | |
lightweight to browse even on low-end machines. | |
The plain text-ness also makes it nice and compact to read, unlike | |
HTML layouts which are entirely up to the web designers. | |
Because of these strengths, many enthusiasts such as me still use | |
it, and even prefer it to the modern web. I personally think | |
browsers should not be an entire OS, and anything more complicated | |
than a static plain text page should be a dedicated app instead of | |
a web app. | |
.. | |
0_README_how_to_browse 2016-Nov-11 17:49 - | |
escaping_special_chars 2016-Nov-10 22:55 - |