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daemon13 | 12 years ago

This is the first time I heard about Gopher.

Why it's a terrible protocol?

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frezik|12 years ago

There are certain modes where it simply cuts the connection when the server is done transmitting. There's no length header or end-of-transmission character or anything like that.

frezik|12 years ago

I did a more complete writeup on Gopher's problems here:

http://www.wumpus-cave.net/2013/10/27/why-gopher-is-awful/

Once I did a little research and wrote it all out, Gopher actually came out worse than I thought. Even if it were brought up to Gopher+ specifications (which haven't been implemented by anyone in 20 years), it would still be way behind HTTP/1.1 in terms of fixing design flaws.

kalleboo|12 years ago

For one, file types are represented by a single ASCII character http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)#Gopher_item_t...

njsg|12 years ago

And you need more because...

Let's be honest, you just need to know how are you going to deal with the file, not what kind of file it is.

You need something along the lines of - this resource is readable text - this resource is binary data - this resource is an image