Re: Gopher item type for Markdown?

[Christoph Lohmann <20h@r-36.net>]

Greetings.

On Fri, 14 Aug 2020 20:59:00 +0200 Matt Owen <matt@jaruzel.com> wrote:
> Hi All,
> 
> I've been mulling this one over for a while... I'm thinking of adding markdown support to my Gopher client, which is relatively easy to do, but I'd like some input on:
> 
> a) Is this a good thing to do? Markdown is technically still text, but some might feel that it shouldn't be part of the gopher item types.
> 
> b) If the feeling is that there's no issue having support for markdown, what would be the best character to use as an item type identifier. I see that 'M' is already taken (MIME encoded resource), but lower case 'm' isn't. Obviously if I go ahead with this, the item type would need to be an agreed standard. Does anyone have any views on this?

As  other people  already proposed,  use  the file(1)  magic. The  most 
common menu item types are 1, i,  9 and 0. Your client already needs to 
run some kind of plumber script for 9 and 0.                            

Please do never take any item type  because you feel like it. This will 
always go wrong.  The whole menu item type namespace  should stay as it 
is, to not break with backwards compatibility.                          

But there are multiple ways in gopher  to break out of the namespace of 
the menu items:                                                         

1.) file(1) or check for file extensions on whatever is given back. You 
need to do this for images, video, audio already. It is the most widely 
used method on the web too. There the mime type is specified everywhere 
and noone really implements it properly.  See how firefox can have html 
in jpeg files.                                                          

2.) »M«, as stated above allows  to easily have the full mime(!)-type 
namespace accessible. It  just needs to be implemented.  It's an e-mail 
you receive and decode it. MIME is hard to implement, but it would be a 
proper way.                                                             

3.) Escape to a  different protocol, like via »h«, as  in html or the 
non-standard URL:  escape. This is  the way  to go, when  someone might 
think of adding SSH support to gopher. Just use »ssh://«.             

Gopher has so many ways and possibilities, it is beautiful.


Sincerely,

Christoph Lohmann