[gopher] Re: Need for protocol changey
On Thu, 05 Jan 2006 17:19:55 -0600, Benn Newman
<newmanbe@sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
> You say there are failings of Gopher+, okay, fine. But what are we
> actually
> trying to do by making changes to the protocol. How does Gopher benefit
> from having MIME types being so integrated? As John pointed out
> a Tar-gziped file could have any of number of MIME types but you can
> always use extensions. I know that .tar.gz or .tgz means a gziped-tar
> file.
Without MIME, you're just downloading a 9/Binary file, which may or may
not have had a tgz 'extension' in the selector. As Mr. Goerzen wrote, "IE
sometimes looks at the extension of a file to determine what sort of file
it is, and this is generally considered a bug."
> If I want to know a file size, there are perfectly good ways to do so in
> Gopher+
> and in Gopher even. File sizes can be a part of the selectors info text
> ex: 0Super cool book (book.tgz 4kb)\tboot.tgz\tumn.edu\t7070
There is no standard way to show filesize in gopher. I don't think
tacking some stuff in parenthesis to the end of the display string and
expecting a client to read it as file data is such a good idea.
> Feel free to convince me that protocol changes are needed, I haven't
> stopped listening yet. *grin*
The fact that the foremost gopher/gopher+ developers were interested in
changing the protocol isn't enough?
--
Jeff
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