[gopher] New Gopher RFC

[Nuno J. Silva]

On 2012-06-30, Iain R. Learmonth wrote:

>> > As long as there is interest, and this is something I'd be willing
>> > to put time into,
>> 
>> Hey great! Did you have some specific protocol related thoughts on the
>> existing work in progress? Much of the discussion so far has focused on
>> the item types.
>> 
>
> Some key points I came up with after the read of the Google Docs
> document were:
[...]
>  * URL: shouldn't just mean http:// really. In my opinion, it should
> mean URI. This would greatly increase the ability of Gopher to link
> into other resources. I have used, in the not so distant past, a URL:
> to point to an ssh server as part of some network documentation.

URLs make it much easier to refer to different and even new protocols,
in a more unified way. Sure, the client still has to check if the
protocol is supported and then follow the URL (or delegate that to
another piece of software), but that's like checking if an item type is
supported.

Restricting URL: to HTTP will lead us to a scenario like the one which
prompted the addition of the URL and HTML hacks: lack of support for
protocols which may become more popular in the future (in this case, the
WorldWideWeb).

-- 
Nuno J. Silva (aka njsg)
gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg
http://njsg.sdf-eu.org/