[gopher] gopher++ (gopher1) protocol

[Kim Holviala]

On 2010-01-11 14:29, Mateusz Viste wrote:

> You can't do any automated transcoding just like that. It's not that easy.

man 1 convert

ImageMagick handles image conversions just fine - I've used it before to 
see images I didn't have viewer support for. LibC iconv() handles 
charset conversions without any problems.

I agree that converting PDFs and videos is complicated, that's why the 
document said "SHOULD" for those.

> The big problem about your whole transcoding stuff is that a transcoded
> document is not the same document anymore.

No, it's not. What's wrong with that? The client can easily get the 
original resource if it so chooses (simply by not sending the Accept 
header).

 > Say, that I create a PDF
> document where most information is vector graphic. If the client ask for
> us-ascii text, an automated transcoding program will simply drop all
> things which are not bare text, and my PDF will look like crap.

True. But if a client asks for it to be converted to PNG it'll look just 
fine. Reading the manual it seems that very same convert(1) will convert 
PDFs to images.

[..]

I downloaded the first PDF I found from Google (2010 Form W-4) and 
simply tried this (without reading the manpages):

[kimmy at t61 Desktop]$ convert fw4.pdf fw4.png
[kimmy at t61 Desktop]$ echo $?
0
[kimmy at t61 Desktop]$ ls -la *png
-rw-r--r-- 1 kimmy users 64563 2010-01-11 14:43 fw4-0.png
-rw-r--r-- 1 kimmy users 51280 2010-01-11 14:43 fw4-1.png

Now that wasn't too hard? Definately easier than coding PDF support into 
the client. Now all the server has to do is to stitch those two images 
together (there might have been a convert option for that too).

> That's why in my opinion, applying *any* automated transcoding is wrong.
> If I want my document to be readable by C64 owners, I will write it in a
> way that will allow that.

Except that, of course, you don't. Neither do I. We don't do it because 
we just don't care. A theoretical C=64 user will care, though, but 
that's his problem for not using the latest Firefox on a quad Xeon, right?



- Kim