[gopher] gopher++ (gopher1) protocol

[Kim Holviala]

On 2010-01-11 15:49, Kacper Gutowski wrote:

>> Yes, servers would be *a lot more* complicated. But clients would be
>> simpler as they could count on the server to do what's being asked.
>
> In order to support your Gopher++, clients would need to have
> sophisticated detection and fallback routines because server is
> free to fail some conversions even if it supports Gopher++.

Well, everything falls back to gopher0. So basically, what you're saying 
is that "rfc1436"-compliant gopher client needs sophisticated detection 
and fallback routines - which incidently is true.

[image transcoding]
> I would choose to do a plain text. After all that's what is Gopher for.

True. I got a bit carried away with stuff when I was writing it... I 
think I should remove all traces of audio and video from the doc. Even 
the image format conversions are a bit off - but definately useful as 
images *are* important.

> And if there are really such strict limitations I'd simply stick to
> original Gopher protocol.  Mind that many would like to put their servers
> on such limited devices.

100% backward and forward compatibility. What's stopping you from using 
a text-only gopher0 client? Why would you be bothered at the extra stuff 
the server offers?

>> do with text that has high-bit characters? Do you count on it being
>> Latin-1 like the original RFC says? Do you trust it to be UTF-8? Do
>> you try to magically sniff the content charset?
>
> I would be really happy to be able to just assume that's UTF-8.

You can't, as gopher0 doesn't say it's UTF-8.

> Server can not do much with non-Latin text when asked to serve it
> as US-ASCII anyway.

If I serve out standard Latin-1 menus my Firefox (both Win and Linux) 
barfs and won't print those resource lines (don't know why). Stripping 
the high-bit chars away at least lets me read most of the text. This 
isn't some hypothetical thing either, this is what I encountered with my 
UTF-8 filenames I was serving out.

>> Seems pretty good to me.... If we take 1 server and 100 clients, I
>> know where I would prefer my file format support to be - in the same
>> place where the actual files are.
>
> That's a 1 server going out of resources pretty fast.

That might be, but we don't know it until someone (me) tries it. But I 
don't think the server runs out of resources - I'm not planning on doing 
the conversions more than one (caching does exist).



- Kim