[gopher] Updated Gopher RFC

Cameron Kaiser spectre at floodgap.com
Wed May 9 13:16:15 UTC 2012


> - Keeps the initial items, along with the few more that were widely
>   adopted for specific formats (e.g. pdf and png)
> - Add new purpose-based item types (image, movie, document, ...) to be
>   used with a new mime-type field 
> - Split the "unallocated blocks" of item types in purpose-based regions
>   (e.g. new types in the range a-j should be used for images, j-o for
>   movies)

I would support this idea, with one addition: we need a way to handle the
MIME types in a URL. One very simple way is URLs like

gopher://foo.invalid/(text/plain)/manifesto.txt

Clients not knowing the new format would treat ( as a new, unknown item type
and offer to download the file. However, servers would need to account for
the situation of receiving selectors such as

text/plain)/manifesto.txt

from these clients. If that couldn't be easily identified,

gopher://foo.invalid/M(text/plain)/manifesto.txt

would be seen by those clients as M item type with selector

(text/plain)/manifesto.txt

and this would be even easier to identify. Smart clients, of course, would
take the MIME information and parse the selector properly.

I'd always prefer to put more work on the server side than the client side.

-- 
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaiser.com/ --
  Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com * ckaiser at floodgap.com
-- Where there's a will, there's a probate. -----------------------------------



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