[gopher] Updated Gopher RFC

[Nuno J. Silva]

On 2012-05-19, Wolfgang Faust wrote:

>> >> Yes, that is exactly what I intend.  I have a working draft on Google
>> >> Docs, and you can edit it as you please, but don't leave editorial
>> >> comments on Docs (trying to keep it RFC-like).  If you want to talk
>> >> --- actually talk --- about it, I have an IRC channel that we can talk
>> >> on.
> Where's the Google doc? I have one too, at
> https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yodrJvmflZIkqWAp5HC162bxMDe7IU2oC7KLBhRIbPE/edit
> but I'd like to see what you've got.

Is there any chance you can allow other people to add some kind of
comments to the document?

Or you prefer to get comments through email or IRC?

Anyway, here I go, despite my rather limited knowledge of The History of
Gopher:

Regarding itemtype 5, you say

,----
| Binary file
| Note: The original RFC defined this as a DOS binary file.
| TODO: What is the difference from selector 9?
`----

My guess is that the original plan was to split binary files (possibly
executables) by operating systems, so you have the generic selector 9
and also:
- 4 for Macintosh
- 5 for PC-DOS/MS-DOS
- 6 for UNIX

So that clients could ignore files that would not run or be usable on
their platforms.

Now, uuencode is a tool used to send binary files through e-mail
messages in UNIX systems (which was, of course, probably more common
back in the days MIME support wasn't as widespread as nowadays), and the
same is probably also the case with BinHex and Macintosh.

The RFC authors probably adopted those for that reason, maybe in an
attempt to avoid 8 bit content in Gopher (both BinHex and uuencode are
tools that convert binaries (8 bit) to plain-text ASCII (7 bit)).


Of course, I may be wrong.

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