[gopher] bandwidth overhead for gopher

[Kim Holviala]

> On 23 Jan 2015, at 18:09, Brian Koontz <brian at pongonova.net> wrote:
> 
> On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 08:04:59AM +0200, Kim Holviala wrote:
>> 
>> Also, HTTP can compress data on the fly resulting in much smaller transfer sizes than Gopher can ever do.
> 
> There's no reason why a gopher server couldn't compress on the fly.  It's
> just another binary file...

True, but because Gopher doesn’t have any metadata the client cannot ask for, and cannot know if the reply is compressed or not. Gophernicus for example can easily be configured to gzip everything on the fly… but no gopher client will ever be able to understand what the hell is happening.


- Kim