[gopher] A letter to Mozilla Foundation

[Cameron Kaiser]

> > My personal feeling is that they wanted to shake out technologies they
> > believed were not worth their time, and they chose (not unreasonably)
> > Moz 2.0 where a large number of internal changes were taking place to
> > draw that line. Although they never went out and said it, this was
> > implied by comments like Mike Shaver's where they did not want cycles
> > wasted on testing and development for it.
> 
> I'd like them to state clearly the true, deep reason. Although, we've
> already found they're against gopher support itself, we deserve a clear
> answer.

I did find a Google Chrome request someone filed to add gopher to that.
It was pretty crisply rejected even though a lot of people joined in.

> Gopher saw some interest in the last months, like an article at
> BoingBoing (then quoted in /.), on the "gopher archive".
> 
> A key point in spreading gopher is the support of a largely used browser
> like Firefox. As we will still have a pointer to Overbite when browsing
> gopher:, that's not completely lost (I don't mean it's good, I mean it
> isn't as bad as it could be) --- people can still follow the link and
> install Overbite.

I hope that Mozilla adopts bug 572000; this at least gives people a way
to migrate. I think, though, we should be emphasizing more why Gopher is
different rather than the popular misconception that it's a "mini Web."
Rob did put this very well, better than I did in so many words:

> "Thinkig of it like that, a method of easily serving directoies of data,
> rather than a scaled down web makes the whole thing more appealing I
> think."
> 
> in gopher://gopher.robsayers.com/0/whygopher.txt

I think anything helping to encourage its hierarchical nature serves to
make it more distinct, and therefore more valuable/relevant.

Also, I'm exploring Gopher in constrained environments. On Twitter we
were talking about Gopher over AX.25 and KISS packet radio links. This
sounds like a terrific use for a link that is at best 9600bps and often
as low as 1200bps, much like using GPRS and Overbite Android on a mobile
device.

> > I heard back from the SeaMonkey folks and they were happy to offer
> > assistance porting OverbiteFF to SM, and it's nearly done if people want
> > to give it a spin.
> 
> I've not used Seamonkey for ages (actually, I never used it, I used the
> Mozilla Suite), but maybe it's time to look at it again :-)

1522 has SeaMonkey support in it, so let me know how you like it. SM are
strict embedders of Mozilla, so when they adopt Mozilla 2.0 (in SM 2.1),
gopher dies there also. However, 2.1 is barely in its second alpha and there
is probably a long way to go before it will even make beta.

I myself use Camino, which is still on 1.9.0 and only just going to 1.9.2,
although being non-XUL and having no overt extension mechanism it requires
hackery to get Overbite in it.

-- 
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- And now for something completely different. -- Monty Python ----------------