[gopher] Clients, capabilities and discoverability

[Nuno J. Silva]

Cameron Kaiser <spectre at floodgap.com> writes:

[...]
> As I recall it looked something like
>
> 	[GOPHER$SOMETHING.SOMETHING.SOMETHING]THEFILE.TXT
>
> which if my rusty VMS recollection serves me is roughly the same as a
> standard Files-11 filespec.

So on the VMS case it's not just about knowing the separator, but also
the format. In that path, looking for the rightmost dot would lead us to
browse 

     [GOPHER$SOMETHING.SOMETHING.SOMETHING]THEFILE

which still points to a file.

But if the meaning of separator is to remove everything at the right of
the rightmost separator character (keeping it there), saying the
separator is "]" would work.


>> It will take some time, I'm still looking for a way to install
>> applications that does not involve a web download (it does bluetooth, it
>> just refuses to exchange .JARs over it).
>> 
>> Meanwhile, I will look for an emulator so that I can at least play with
>> the code.
>
> There are a number of MIDlet emulators out there, I think. I just run it
> directly on my Android phone using Netmite.

Still no progress, but I'll try installing the Oracle/Sun tools. (I just
hope that the tools (a 32-bit binary package) don't clash with the 64
bits JRE...) That should allow me to compile J2ME code, and I think it
also has an emulator.

>> One of such interfaces could be a graph, like this one (for the web)
>> 
>> http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/b9/WorldWideWebAroundWikipedia.png
>> 
>> This really highlights hyperlinking, the (IMHO) main feature of both the
>> web and the gopherspace.
>
> Something like that, although laid out in such a way that things weren't
> overlaying other things. But it's more a pipe dream than anything
> serious :)

But still a good thing to seek. But it will require some work.

Meanwhile, I'm tempted to find a way to present menus as tress in
Firefox. I'd try generating a XUL file instead of a HTML one (as
Overbite does). Provided that it works, I would just need to change the
HTML generation code at components/protocol.js so that it generates
XUL. (And then I wonder how easy will it be to provide javascript code
to make the menu do something...)

-- 
Nuno J. Silva
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg