Why Is Gopher Still Relevant?

The web is like an operating system that you are locked into using. This prevents alternative operating systems such as Plan 9 from ever becoming useful, because building a web browser is such a monumental effort. Even if a decent web browser were built for Plan 9 it would defeat the purpose of using such an alternative OS because the web binds software to content. The web has effectively killed innovation in operating systems. A clean and consistent system will…

Counterpoints: What makes Gopher irrelevant? 1. Only one byte to specify filetype in the protocol, with only a few filetypes being being defined in the protocol, the remaining being unofficial and implementation-dependent. Most filetypes that are defined still are ambiguous. 2. No support for Unicode in the protocol, or even for any character set but ISO-8859-1. Non-europeans can eat shit and die. 3. No support for encryption nor compression in the protocol. 4. Any implementation supporting an above-mentioned…

Gopher is still my ideal when making web pages. I don't do web development professionally, of course, but for all my personal projects I try to limit the main page to under 15kb. For simple pages you can make it "responsive" by default, much like the "mothefuckingwebsite".

> Gopher sites stand and shine on the strength of their content and not the glitz of their bling. Once upon a time the Web was bling-free too. Then people actually started using it, and anytime a large enough audience congregates in one space, pressure builds on the owners of that space to tart it up. So added to the Web were images and animated GIFs, frames and IFRAMEs, RealAudio and Flash, stylesheets and scripts, Bootstrap and React, and all…