the gopher:// manifesto ======================= Gopher is an infoserver which can deliver text, graphics, audio, and multimedia to clients. Keeping documents "link clean", making linking a function of the server info-tree and not in the doc, layout is kept to its most frugal minimum, and is standard across all docs. No graphic design means its the ideal navigable interface, a hypertext Eden. It gives simplified usage for sight-impaired users, same contents for wired/wiredless, and requires no capital investments in layout and "design". Gopher is real -- and it was fully functional in 1992, even without advertisements! But once the Internet became commercialized, this ideal hypertext interface was forgotten, and the gopher dream was scrapped. The dirty little secret is that today, the most popular browsers can recognize any URL -- even gopher://! (Netscape is working to stop this.) (UPDATE: could be a result of "severely overworked programmers": Netscape's gopher is back and getting better all the time!) And mathematical formulae seem to indicate that the speed benefits of putting the entire non-commercial WWW back on gopher could increase access speeds by over 10,000%! Is it time for a new Renaissance on the Internet, to bring back the promise of the early years? gopher://, aka The Bring Back Gopher Campaign, is a grass-roots movement to make this happen. What we need: - Modern Gopher servers (eventual goal is for an Apache Gopher server) - Old gopher clients recompiled for modern clients, and distributed with them by default (Apple support)(http://athene.dnsalias.org/gopher) New: Mozilla support! (http://www.mozilla.org) - Investigate the "plugin possibility": the last Gopher server was ported to FreeBSD; developer says a release of the VR Gopher source code (still proprietary!) could give Gopher a future as a plugin... - A gopher-browser capable of receiving gopher-streams for audio and video - Campaign focal point with mailing-list: now live, see gopher://gopher.browser.org/ or also http://gopher.browser.org/ - Gopher-compatible multimedia streams for television stations We can do it! (November 16, 2000, updated April 26, 2001 and early 2002)