Why Gopher lost to HTML | Hacker News Reader

Why Gopher lost to HTML

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25 pointsAndrewWarner18 comments

I surfed the gopher net and all I got was this lousy URL - gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/1/overbite/ (works in FF + others).

"Also, Internet Explorer should NOT be used at ALL! (I'll explain presently).", see gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/0/gopher/wbgopher

Edit: first it's poor links2 support, now no linkifying of gopher links, shocking ...

Your standard Linux distro probably has the gopher command line client installed. I'm slightly disappointed that its not in OSX.

It's not on my Kubuntu and I'd be a bit upset if it was - why include it? Especially as the major browsers have gopher support.

Hmm, it's in my Debian but I might have installed it.

Though, browser support is no reason not to include a tiny command-line client.

I may have stripped it out. Given the ease with which a client can be installed ("sudo apt-get install ...") then why waste the space. Sure it's small but the principle stands, and many small programs add to lots of space - also that small program is going to be downloaded millions of times unnecessarily, written to CD/DVD, written to HDD or flash drives .. countless transfers and writes, even for a few KB that's a waste.

So you'd advocate the removal of ftp because Firefox and Konqueror support it?

I'm sure the popularity-contest data shows that FTP is used quite a lot. Gopher barely ever. So, "no" unless there were a "command line tools" checkbox on install that could be used to exclude it. I've never actually used the FF ftp (until you mentioned it) and didn't even know it was there - I only occasionally use ftp in a console, usually I'll use Dolphin or Krusader (KDE4).

The best client to use on a graphical system Firefox with the Overbite extension: http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/d?ff3

For console use Lynx is what I prefer and seems to be popular for that.

Shameless Plug: gopher://gopher.robsayers.com

What's the name of your gopher server software?

I like the image of Firefox 1.5 on that page. That was my favorite iteration of their UI.

That's almost exactly what Firefox 3.5 looks like for me in Linux. No oversized back button or anything like the default Windows theme.

I imagine there's probably a classic icon theme that will change the icons to match those old ones.

There are lots of themes at http://addons.mozilla.org , they even have a retro category. Foxscape, for example, goes all the way back to Netscape theme. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/4083

I've long maintained that WAP was bitpacked Gopher via Telegram

How do I get a gopher domain-name?

Domain names are not protocol-specific.

No gopher names? Oh, well... my GopherDaddy! empire probably wouldn't have been very successful anyway..

You have a standard domain name (as siblings note) and run a gopher server via that name. You'll have to have your own server (or virtual server) as I can't really imagine any hosting company allows gopher servers?!

TurboGopher VR had such potential.

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