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[XML-DEV Mailing List Archive Home] [By Thread] [By Date] [Recent Entries] [Reply To This Message] Re: [Fwd: W3C ridiculous new policy on patents]
 Jonathan Borden wrote: > We might recall the early days of the WWW when the web was in competition > with something called "gopher", anyone remember gopher? I do. > If not there is a > reason: When the WWW was just starting, gopher was significantly more > popular and then the University of Michigan asserted its intellectual > property rights on gopher indicating that it was to retain the future right > to license its use (or something to that effect). Blink. Gopher died [...] I hardly think that was the only reason. Gopher was a tad retarded: it only handled plain text, menus of hyperlinks, search pages, and downloadable files. It had nothing like HTML 2.0 that permitted fancy text with embedded links (and later images). I poked around at gopher://gopher.tc.umn.edu a while back. It still presents "All the Gophers in the World", though few if any of them are answering any more. ObIrrelevant: I specced out, but didn't get to implement, an advanced gopherspace browser called Wanderer that kept a persistent store of navigation arcs. If you navigated from menu A to submenu B, a link was planted on (your view of) menu B that pointed back to A. You could further annotate any menu with a random link by the simple process of jumping from the menu to the new location. The four types of links -- original unvisited, original visited, parent, jump -- were marked by different icons in the menu view. In this way, the gopher menus and the history graph were fully integrated rather than being completely separate animals (and the history reduced to a mere stack) as in all Web browsers even today. Furthermore, the persistent store was also accessible to a gopher server that would return "your view of gopherspace" to any other gopher client. It essentially functioned as a Decorating Proxy, forwarding all non-local requests to the appropriate real-gopherspace servers unchanged, and adding any additional arcs and link-type tags on the way out. -- Not to perambulate || John Cowan <jcowan@r...> the corridors || http://www.reutershealth.com during the hours of repose || http://www.ccil.org/~cowan in the boots of ascension. \\ Sign in Austrian ski-resort hotel 
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