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	Why I use Gophermaps
	July 01st, 2018
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	maiki just asked why I use gophermaps for my phlog instead of
	plain text. I know others at bitreich [0] have commented on the
	practice with various opinions on why "misusing" gophermaps is
	bad. Plenty of people on gopher use plain text for their content
	and I am not going to complain. My choice is a product of style
	and philosophy.

	Style:

	One of the best things about hypertext is the ability to link
	contextually to relevant content. Gopher is missing this to
	a degree, but not entirely. We can't link a block of text inline
	like in HTML but we can link a line. That functionality is
	entirely limited to gophermaps, though. Without the gophermap the
	best we can do is include a text link and rely on the client to go
	above and beyond the protocol to enable interaction (like VF-1 so
	valiantly does).

	My choice, stylistically, was to take it upon myself to do
	a little extra work and build in the links directly into the
	content by making my phlogs a gophermap. I first announced this
	change [1] back in October of 2017 when I was still relatively new
	at this whole thing. In fact, I was piggybacking on the very
	bare-bones shell scripts that would later become burrow [2]. My
	first iteration was just a bunch of echo commands to a blank file
	and then launching vim [3]. These days I have the ability to edit
	existing phlog entries, generate in plain text or gophermaps,
	auto-generate RSS, and a bunch of other crap.

	Philosophy:

	From what I've seen over my time on gopher the biggest complaint
	about gophermaps for content isn't about the effort involved in
	creating them. Instead it's an argument for purity in the
	protocol. "Don't use the 'i' item type for this sort of thing,"
	they say. "The 'i' type isn't even in RFC 1436!" And it's true.
	The type isn't defined in 1436, and it definitely isn't pure
	gopher as envisioned in the two-week sprint that a bunch of guys
	at the University of Minnesota did as much to stick it to the man
	(their school beauracracy) as they did to just get something out
	there for the community to react to.

	See, I don't see that as something to protect through purity. The
	mindset of those guys was to iterate, to share, to build, and to
	make the internet better. They didn't sit for years in planning
	before deploying the end-all-be-all of protocols. They cobbled
	together some crap on top of existing tools and made improvements.
	And that's what type "i" did later. It enabled us to write more
	description than would fit on one line so there was context to
	a link.

	That's what I see myself doing when I phlog. The links below (and
	now sometimes in-line) are given context by my post. If you're
	reading and say, "hey, I should check that out!" now you can. You
	just follow the link and boom, there you are.

	For those folks who don't bother with it and post in plain text,
	if I really want to chase down a link I can select it and manually
	enter it. It's more difficult, but it's doable. I hold no grudge
	against them for their choice.

	If you are new to gopher and just want to toss up markdown files
	that you're also using to generate a web version, go for it. I'll
	be more happy that you've decided to add content here than
	anything else. I'm certainly not going to berate your efforts by
	nit-picking on whether you use type 1 or type 0.

	[0] bitreich.org
	[1] New Format Test
	[2] burrow
	[0] This is amazeballs