Why is Gopher Still Relevant?
Cameron Kaiser, from the Overbite Project
Most people who "get" Gopher are already using it and instinctively
understand why Gopher is still useful and handy. On the other hand,
people who inhabit the Web generation after Gopher's decline only see
Gopherspace as a prototype Web or a historical curiosity, not a world
in its own right -- and more to the point, being only such a
"prototype," there is the wide belief that Gopher plays no relevant
role in today's Internet and is therefore unnecessary. This has led to
many regrettable consequences, such as the neglect of servers and
clients, or even active removal of support.
However, there is much to be gained from a heterogeneous network
environment where there are multiple methods of information access,
and while the Web will confidently remain the primary means of
Internet information dissemination, there continues to be a role for
Gopher-based resources even in this modern age. Gopher and the Web
can, and should, continue to coexist.
The misconception that the modern renaissance of Gopherspace is simply
a reaction to "Web overload" is unfortunately often repeated and,
while superficially true, demonstrates a distinct lack of insight.
From a purely interface perspective, there is no question that Gopher
could be entirely "subsumed" under the Web (technical differences to
be discussed presently). Very simple HTML menus and careful attention
to hierarchy would yield an experience very much like a Gopher menu,
and some have done exactly that as a deliberate protest against the
sensory overload of modern Web 2.0.
Gopher, however, is more than a confederated affiliation of networks
with goals of minimalism; rather, Gopher is a mind-set on making
structure out of chaos. On the Web, even if such a group of
confederated webmasters existed, it requires their active and willful
participation to maintain such a hierarchical style and the
seamlessness of that joint interface breaks down abruptly as soon as
one leaves for another page. Within Gopherspace, all Gophers work the
same way and all Gophers organize themselves around similar menus and
interface conceits. It is not only easy and fast to create gopher
content in this structured and organized way, it is mandatory by its
nature. Resulting from this mandate is the ability for users to
navigate every Gopher installation in the same way they navigated the
one they came from, and the next one they will go to. Just like it had
been envisioned by its creators, Gopher takes the strict hierarchical
nature of a file tree or FTP and turns it into a friendlier format
that still gives the fast and predictable responses that they would
get by simply browsing their hard drive. As an important consequence,
by divorcing interface from information, Gopher sites stand and shine
on the strength of their content and not the glitz of their bling.
Furthermore, Gopher represents the ability to bring an interconnected
browsing experience to low-computing-power environments. Rather than
the expense of large hosting power and bandwidth, Gopher uses an
inexpensive protocol to serve and a trivial menuing format to parse,
making it cost-effective for both client and server. Gopher sites can
be hosted and downloaded effectively on bandwidth-constrained networks
such as dialup and even low-speed wireless, and clients require little
more than a TCP stack and minimal client software to navigate them. In
an environment where there are cries for "green computing" and "green
data centres," along with large-scale media attention on emerging
technology markets in developing nations and the proliferation of
wireless technology with limited CPU and memory, it is hypocritical to
this author why an established protocol such as Gopher would be
bypassed for continued reliance on inefficient programming paradigms
and expensive protocols. Indeed, this sort of network doublethink has
wrought large, unwieldy solutions such as WAP, a dramatic irony, since
in the case of many low-power devices such as consumer mobile phones,
the menu format used on them is nearly completely analogous to what
Gopher already offered over a decade earlier. More to the point, few
in that market segment support the breadth of WAP, and those that can
simply use a regular Web browser instead.
Finally, if Web and gopher can coexist in the client's purview, they
can also exist in the server's. HTML can be served by both gopher
servers and web servers, or a Gopher menu can be clothed in CSS,
translated to HTML, and given to a web browser (and in its native form
to a Gopher client). This approach yields a natural and highly elegant
consequence: if you don't want to choose strictly one way or the other
to communicate to your users, choose neither and offer them both a
structured low-bandwidth approach or a higher-bandwidth Web view,
built from the same content. The precedent of a single serving
solution offering both to both clients has been in existence since the
early days of the Web with tools such as GN, and today with more
modern implementations such as pygopherd. Gopher menus are so trivial
to parse that they can easily be HTML-ified with simple scripts and
act as the basis for both morphs; what's more, their data-oriented
approach means they require little work to construct and maintain, and
content creation in general becomes simple and quick with the
interface step already taken care of. Plus, many servers easily
generate dynamic gopher menus with built-in executable support,
providing the interactive nature demanded by many modern applications
while still fitting into Gopher's hierarchical format, and virtually
all modern Gopher servers can aggregate links to Web content to forge
bidirectional connections.
Modern Gopherspace represents the next and greatest way for
alternative information access, and the new generation of Gopher
maintainers demonstrate a marked grassroots desire for a purer way to
get to high-quality resources. Not simply nostalgia for the "way it
used to be," modern Gopherspace is a distinctly different population
than in the mid 1990s when it flourished, yet one on which modern
services can still be found, from news and weather to search engines,
personal pages, "phlogs" and file archives. It would be remiss to
dismissively say Gopher was killed by the Web, when in fact the Web
and Gopher can live in their distinct spheres and each contribute to
the other. With the modern computing emphasis on interoperability,
heterogeneity and economy, Gopher continues to offer much to the
modern user, as well as in terms of content, accessibility and
inexpensiveness. Even now clearly as second fiddle to the World Wide
Web, Gopher still remains relevant. -- Cameron Kaiser