[372] in World Wide Web
Re: Mosaic and Lynx can't read Gopher forms?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (yandros@MIT.EDU)
Sat Aug 13 17:29:11 1994
From: yandros@MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 13 Aug 94 17:28:41 -0400
To: yoav@MIT.EDU
Cc: bug-sipb@MIT.EDU, rnewman@media.mit.edu, www@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: <9408122109.AA02223@marinara.MIT.EDU> (yoav@MIT.EDU)
It's occurred to me that perhaps my previous answer was a bit vague,
especially if people aren't `up' on gopher.
Here's the short story: gopher, as a protocol, is old and very simple;
that was it's great strength (IMHO). Eventually, the Gopher people
wanted to be able to do more than gopher could handle, so they came
out with a much more complicated successor, Gopher+. One thing that
Gopher+ supports is `ASK blocks'. ASK blocks in gopher are sort of
like forms in HTML. If anyone really wants details I can find them; I
don't know them offhand.
The relevant part is this: Gopher+ is a newer, more complicated
protocol, and (to my knowledge) none of the current Web browsers
understand Gopher+. It wasn't completely clear how support for
Gopher+ in URL's would work until the issue was carried through the
IETF working group recently; the results are in a draft-status RFC on
URLs right now.
Make sense?
chad
