Re: [gopher] gopher++ (gopher1) protocol
On 2010-01-11 14:09:06, Kim Holviala wrote:
> Yes, servers would be *a lot more* complicated. But clients would be
> simpler as they could count on the server to do what's being asked.
In order to support your Gopher++, clients would need to have
sophisticated detection and fallback routines because server is
free to fail some conversions even if it supports Gopher++.
> Consider this: you're doing a client to Commodore 64 and can only
> fit in one image decoder routine. Which one would you choose? With
> gopher++ you'd choose the one that's easiest on the client resources
> and then ask the server to serve out all images in using that
> format. With gopher0 you'll choose one format and all the other
> image formats are unaccessible.
I would choose to do a plain text. After all that's what is Gopher for.
And if there are really such strict limitations I'd simply stick to
original Gopher protocol. Mind that many would like to put their servers
on such limited devices.
> Let's continue with the Commodore 64 example. Can you fit iconv()
> into the little old C=64? No, you probably can't. So what will you
> do with text that has high-bit characters? Do you count on it being
> Latin-1 like the original RFC says? Do you trust it to be UTF-8? Do
> you try to magically sniff the content charset? With gopher++ you
> don't have to, just ask the server to send out everything in
> US-ASCII.
I would be really happy to be able to just assume that's UTF-8.
Server can not do much with non-Latin text when asked to serve it
as US-ASCII anyway.
> What if you want to read an HTML document through gopher on your
> C=64? With gopher0 your client has to know HTML (and we know what
> kind of a mess that is).
> (...)
It is an internet gopher right? Author surely had provided a plain text
version if that was possible. If that is not, automatic conversion won't
probably do anything useful out of it either.
> >The whole idea of server transcoding data for client is ridiculous for me.
>
> Seems pretty good to me.... If we take 1 server and 100 clients, I
> know where I would prefer my file format support to be - in the same
> place where the actual files are.
That's a 1 server going out of resources pretty fast.
--
Kacper Gutowski
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