[gopher] Re: Item Type Suggestions
JumpJet Mailbox wrote
>Today, there is almost NO excuse why a single person could not build a near flawless piece of Gopher Software in about a week or two. The real issue here in NOT "can it be programmed quickly and relatively bug-free", but rather "what FEATURES are to be incorporated".
>
Absolutely. My thought is that, since we are not in a position of
trying to one-up any other internet protocol, we can make sure that
Gopher remains relatively easy to make clients for. I have even seen a
few occassions where building a gopher client was considered an
introductory programming activity to learn about sockets that was useful
in the wild. That is what Gopher is and can continue to be: a budding
computer person's first programming project!
>We are not in a market competition that requires rapid software release to stay ahead of the competitors, nor are profits hinging on the rapid realease of software. We are instead striving to get more uses interested in the Gopher Protocol. The critera for that goal is software with "Features People Want", and "Relatively bug-free performance". These goals dictate doing the job "Right The First Time" (NOT quick and dirty programming).
>
Is that what everyone is after, getting more people interested in the
protocol? Personally, I think the protocol as it stands is attractive
(at least to me) for it simplicity (relative to www), its
programmibility by smaller groups and individuals on their spare time,
and just the "cool" factor of not following the herd. Updating or
changing the protocol may hurt these things, which would drive me away
and who knows who else. If people want to do this, I suggest a new
protocol that could be said to be derived from Gopher. I will keep
running a "vanilla" Gopher server. I think the UMN people who wrote the
protocol did it quite "right the first time" (although I think what we
have as the protocol was soemthing that they had been working on a while
and went through several revisions before being made a standard.) and I
personally see no pressing need to add anything more, even if they are
"Features People Want". Let those things be included in some new
protocol or simply use www, which is definately skewed to trying to be
all things to all people.
>We are only likely to have a potential new Gopher Protocol user examine the protocol and software ONCE. If he doesn't see what he needs (or he sees slapped-together-software), it is unlikely that he will ever examine the protocol again.
>
If they don't already like Gopher for what it is (lone hacker's
paradise), I think they should feel free to move on and find something
more to their liking. The last thing I want to see is someone hijacking
Gopher and changing its nature. This still feels like an attempt to
convert people from www to some reinvented Gopher, which doesn't seem
very sensible to me. Gopher already has its merits and I stand behind
them. It may never have a far bigger audience than it has now, but if I
was really after that, I would spend time on my web sites - That is a
huge potential audience!
Jay Nemrow
Quasi-Indefatigable Xenolith
gopher://quix.us telnet://quix.us (yeah, there's a http://quix.us as well)
Dial-in QuIX gopher: 1(575)461-0077
email: jnemrow@quix.us
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