[gopher] New Gopher RFC

[Iain R. Learmonth]

> > 
> > 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:

 * Whether or not the trailing CRLF.CRLF is sent at the end of a menu listing really needs to be defined. I saw too many "should"s that in my opinion should have been "must"s.

 * On the redirection page issue, this has been implemented in a lot of Gopher servers (in all the ones I use) and unless there are technical reasons as to not using them in a specific implementation, they should be produced. Clients not implementing URL: but that acknowledge that the h type exists and know about HTML or can open something that knows about HTML are then able to have that application open the URL.

 * 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.

 * The about.txt page? Definately not included in the Gopher protocol spec. I've never implemented it. I'm not sure how prevalent it is, but shouldn't other protocols like finger or simply using email to {root,abuse}@gopherserver.fake suffice?

I think I had more points, but my notes are in the office. I'll follow up on Monday if I missed anything.

Iain Learmonth
Electronics Research Group
University of Aberdeen