Gopher redirection
One feature I didn't mention in my announcement of my gopher server [1] is
my experimental redirection feature. I really miss the ability to redirect
requests that I know are malformed. Why not just serve up the content under
the malformed selector? Because in my opinion, it locks you into a
structure. And if the layout of the site changes, it's hard to inform users
of the new locations [2].
After some thought, I came up with a system that doesn't break existing
clients, but can be used to indicate a change in selector. One common
malformed selector I kept seeing at my gopher server [3] was '/Phlog:'---it
should be 'Phlog:' (note the lack of leading slash). So now when I see that
selector, my server returns [4]:
3Permanent redirectionFPhlog:Fgopher.conman.orgF70
A client can then check the display text for "Permanent redirection" and
use the given selector to retrieve the content, but short of that, a user
can (hopefully) see this and adjust the selector accordingly.
There's nothing in RFC-1436 that forbids this (heck, RFC-1436 only has two
occurances of the word 'error'!). It breaks nothing, and gives some
critical information to the user and/or the client. I wouldn't mind seeing
this (or something like this) being adapted by the gopher community.
-spc (Thoughts? Criticisms?)
[1] https://github.com/spc476/port70
[2] It happened to me with the bongusta phlog aggregation site. It
changed location at one point and I didn't get the memo.
[3] gopher://gopher.conman.org/
[4] Using 'F' to designate tab characters per RFC-1436
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