[gopher] Gophernicus, caps and revival of gopher++

[Kim Holviala]

[insert witty greeting here]

Inspired by brother Jay of quix.us fame I started coding gophery stuff 
again...

First thing I did this morning was adding native support for Cameron's 
caps.txt (see gopher://gophernicus.org/0/caps.txt for a live example). 
The format of my caps.txt is pretty identical to that from Cameron, 
apart from the comments which I removed (keeps the code cleaner).  I did 
add one key to it which I think it fairly important (forget the Output* 
headers, those were just for testing):

ServerProtocol=RFC1436

This tells the client which protocol the server confirms to. I guess 
pygopherd could change that to "gopher+":

ServerProtocol=gopher+

Or maybe like this:

ServerProtocol=RFC1436, gopher+

Or how about

ServerProtocol=RFC1436
ServerProtocol=gopher+

ANYWAY.

This got me thinking about my failed attempt at extending the protocol 
to make it possible for the client to include metadata in the request. I 
had to scrap the extensions because some servers just didn't like the 
extra stuff... So, with caps.txt the client could first query the server 
about the protocol, and if caps says it's ok to have extra metadata then 
it could send 'em.

Or something like that.

Comments? Ideas?



- Kim