Re: Gopher, trapped in amber

Henrik Frystyk Nielsen (frystyk@w3.org)
Tue, 12 Jan 1999 19:27:49 -0500

At 18:31 1/12/99 -0500, Kragen Sitaker wrote:
>On Tue, 12 Jan 1999, Robert S. Thau wrote:
>> use out of your Gopher client. And Mosaic, following the lead of the
>> CERN libWWW, did not support Gopher+ at all. Which, in turn, acted to
>> seriously impede the adoption of Gopher+, as Mosaic quickly acquired
>> many, many users who it became politically difficult to lock out.
>
>I'm curious why Gopher+ support was never added to libWWW. Surely it
>would have been trivial for the UMN people to write a libWWW patch,
>wouldn't it?

It sort of was although not quite, see

http://www.w3.org/Library/src/HTGopher.c

I never received a patch (which I did for WAIS, for example), and had
trouble finding the spec.

When Ari and I added gopher proxy support to the CERN server we found a
cute gopher icon - it was a yellow, road killed gopher run over by a car -
and the wheel tracks showed up as WWWs. I can't seem to find that icon
anymore. We added it to the HTMLizied gopher menu listings.

Henrik

--
Henrik Frystyk Nielsen,
World Wide Web Consortium
http://www.w3.org/People/Frystyk