# Gopher Annoyances

## Unformatted Text

For some reason I am seeing this a lot more lately on my trips
through gopherspace. Listen, most gopher clients are dumb and just
display text as it is presented, line endings and all. Phloggers,
please hard-wrap your text at the old standard 80 columns or less.

Solene is just one example [0] - I love her phlog but at some point
last year she stopped formatting the text in her posts. Alex
Schroeder is another [1]. Trying to read those posts in my gopher
browser of choice (lynx) is painful. If you're automatically
generating gopher content, please run it through fmt or par
first. My own preference is to wrap text at 68 chars, but some
prefer very narrow text (20 chars or so) to support mobile gopher
browsing. I dislike this, but I suppose it is preferable to run-on
lines.

## Type 1 Text Documents

I talked about this before [2]. From the user's perspective if you
are using a relatively modern gopher client, it's nice to be able to
just follow links embedded in the text. But older gopher clients
barf on these documents. Stop breaking gopher for older clients,
please. Some of us old-timers who were already adults when gopher
was in its heyday like to use older stuff, mkay?

## Broken Selectors

This could be broken in the sense of pointing to a non-existent
file, or broken as in non-functional due to some permissions
error. For the love of Satan people, if you post a phlog entry, test
how it displays in your preferred gopher client. It's annoying to
see a menu item that promises an interesting read, only to be
thwarted by a permissions error.

## Mysterious Selectors

This doesn't affect gopher clients directly, but it _does_ affect
the search indexing of your gopherhole, and it is nice to be able to
search for stuff in gopherspace at times, and get meaningful results
_without_ full-text search [3]. Yes, this is possible. Just stop
using selectors like '/0/376dfe89ac0c.txt' and start using selectors
like '/0/~solene/article-ipfs-openbsd.txt' (I felt bad about harping
on Solene's lack of text formatting before, so I figured I could use
this positive example to ease my conscience).

Now, it is possible to rely on gophermap menu keywords to feed
gopher search engines, but it is still nice to have a readable
gopher URL that will give you or your readers some idea of what is
there.

## Repeat After Me: Gopher is Not the Web

I think most of these annoyances are due to people treating gopher
like the web.

In the case of text formatting, it's the now standard web notion of
separation of content and form with reliance on the client to handle
display properly. Gopher has no such separation. Get over it, format
your text.

With regards to type 1 text documents, it's obviously the yearning
to provide a web-like experience to your readers. But here's the
thing - if I am surfing gopherspace, I want a gopher-like
experience, not a web-like experience. I surf gopherspace to escape
the web, not be reminded of it.

In the case of broken links, it's because we've become reliant on
blog engines or CMSs that handle permissions and posting for
us. Embrace the simplicity. Write text in text files and check that
you can actually view the text file in a gopher client before
claiming success.

In the case of mysterious selectors, well who the hell knows why
this happens or why anyone thinks this is a good idea.

Gopher is not the web. Gopher is, well, gopher. Let's keep it that
way.

[0]: gopher://dataswamp.org/0/%7esolene/article-ipfs-openbsd.txt
[1]: gopher://alexschroeder.ch/02021-04-05_The_things_I_learned
[2]: gopher://gopher.unixlore.net/0/glog/musings-on-gopher-purity.md
[3]: gopher://gopher.floodgap.com/7/v2/vs