Quick gophery thoughts

Lots of exciting stuff is happening in the phlogosphere right now and I'm really

bummed that I just don't have the time to participate in it all as fully as I'd

like. We are slowly moving from the short term rental place that we used as a

base when we arrived in Finland into a place we're renting long term, and it's

eating up a lot of my time, especially as we've ended up repainting the bedroom.

But nobody wants to hear about that...

Popping some thoughts from the stack:

A couple of new phlogs have shown up here at SDF. Welcome, newbies, and

Godspeed!

A really neat phlog aggregator, very similar to something I was thinking of

writing myself (see my recent bboard/GOPHER post) has appeared, by the name

Bongusta has appeared - see gopher://i-logout.cz/1/en/bongusta/. This is great!

Thanks to the author for writing it, for serving it publically, for letting me

know it exists, and for including my phlog in the list.

Thanks to Bongusta, I am discovering that there really is a vibrant phlogosphere

beyond SDF and even Grex! Furthermore, folk out there are talking about the

same stuff we are - better mechanisms for commenting on phlogs, etc. I feel

like the phlogosphere is on the cusp of self-organising itself into something

healthier than it has been in a long time. This is exciting!

Tying very briefly into my recent thoughts on walled gardens yet again, I think

an important criteria by which walled gardens should be judged is the extent to

which they insist, assume or suggest that they should be the entirety of a

person's online experience, as opposed to one star in a wide constellation. SDF

is perhaps a little guilty here. in that by having 'gopher' and 'linx' both

default to SDF homepages it's very easy to fall into the trap of not really

looking outside the fortress. Perhaps this is a bit harsh, it's not like until

recently there was anything like Bongusta they could link to instead. Still,

part of me feels a little naive for how much of a "revelation" it's seemed like

to find frequently updated phlogs elsewhere in the net. This is, of course,

exactly how it should be.

Phlogger "Ze Libertine Gamer" has written about modernising gopher by

standardising on some extensions to provide, e.g. crypotgraphic security. This

is something I have been interested in a long time, but it's not exactly a new

idea and has been hashed out many times on the gopher-project mailing list in

the years I've been subscribed to it, and nothing ever seems to take off. As

reluctant as I am to admit it, I often wonder if the answer to the woes of the

modern web is not to revitalise gopher, but rather to try to reclaim a small

chunk of the web. I have no real beef with HTTP. There is nothing to stop us

writing a browser which implements either an old version of HTML or implements

only a subset of HTML5, leaving out the worst things. With no Javascript, no

plugins, no cookies, etc. it's not that bad. Heck, such browsers exist now,

they just suck for browsing the "real web" because most websites are badly

broken. But just as easily as we can all build gopherholes, we could build

websites which render beautifully in these sites. Then we'd get TLS security,

and multi-tabbed graphical browers with inbuilt bookmarking, etc. Instead of

proudly putting "Valid HTML 4" buttons on our sites, we could write our own

validator and proudly put "Valid Not Awful" buttons on our sites. Validation

criteria could include:

• not setting any cookies
• sticking to a subset of HTML elements (e.g. no )
• not nesting HTML elements more deeply than, say, 3 levels (encourages clean

design)

• having a link to another page hosted at the same domain with the id "up"

(enforces replicating Gopheresque hierarchical organisation)

• not embedding any images larger than, say, 100 kB
• not embedding more than one image per thousand words of text

We could really be as strict as we like, providing a "web within the web" which

offers a user experience with most of the appeal of Gopher without having to

reinvent any wheels. Thoughts?