[gopher] bandwidth overhead for gopher

[Brian Koontz]

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 06:20:34PM +0200, Kim Holviala wrote:
> > 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.

The client could determine it by filename suffix.  The binary type is
generic anyway: I don't think a gopher client really knows what kind of
binary file it's getting.

Been a while since I've looked at that though, so I might be wrong.

  --Brian

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