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Re: TLS in Gopher



Why are we not just following how the introduction of https did it ?

1. TLS enabled gopher links are prefixed by gophers:// 

2. gophers:// links are used in the gophermap file, and shared elsewhere 
in the same manner https:// links are. If the connection to that server 
is already TLS, then it is assumed that all local links in the gophermap 
file that start with a '/' are also TLS.

3. Gopher clients are updated to understand that gophers:// is TLS and on 
a default port of 7443 if no discrete port is specified in the link.

4. Legacy Gopher clients will get updated to support gophers://, or not.

5. Newer clients will be built as part of the growing support for TLS, 
and eventually older clients with no TLS support will stop being used (in 
the same way no-one uses NCSA Mosaic anymore).


When https was introduced, there wasn't any fancy way of letting older 
browsers downgrade the connection - it just wasn't supported. If users 
wanted to access https, then they had to upgrade their browsers. I don't 
see why supporting TLS in gopherspace should be any different.






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