Re: Strange interaction between UM Gopher and Gophernicus
Greetings.
On Fri, 22 Nov 2019 15:04:32 +0100 Kim Holviala <kim@holviala.com> wrote:
> On 22. Nov 2019, at 1.37, David Griffith <dave@661.org> wrote:
> >
> > I think I found a smoking gun. When Gophernicus serves up a directory containing a gophermap file, the selector is separated from the rest of the line by tab characters.
>
> Original author of Gophernicus here. You are all arguing about the wrong thing here: the "problem" is that gopher the protocol has no concept of filename so clients just have to guess one when saving files to disk. This mirrors the problems in HTTP and MIME emails - originally they also didn't have a concept of filenames so saving a file was always a hit or miss (and it still is, kinda, because not all URLs or email attachments come with a filename).
>
> Yes, Gophernicus interprets the gopher RFC "slightly" broadly and uses the name field to give additional information to human users, downside being that computer users might get confused. But it's not against the RFC, just a different interpretation of it.
Another idea for how to have proper filenames in gopher is to use the
»m« type, which is MIME. MIME allows to encode the file and the
metadata for some file.
So when doing something like that as some client standard, we could go
this way. MIME allows many things there.
Sincerely,
Christoph Lohmann
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