purgatori
March 10th, 2010, 04:21 PM
I know that there are probably very few others who feel this way, but I often wish that Gopher, and not the 'web'/http that had become the ascendant protocol. It was minimal, fast, but most of all: consistent. Having to grapple with all sorts of different navigation schemes and superfluous cluttter on sites just to get to the content (either words, pictures, or video/audio files) I'm interested in drives me nuts sometimes. I use either Vimperator or Elinks to get around the web, and both of them make a valiant effort to deliver keyboard-driven navigation that is both 'sane' and consistent, but all too often they are foiled by web developers who think that they have to hide their content behind all sorts of Flash, Java/script, and other malarkey that obliges users to take that infernal rodent in hand and click their way until whatever beast of an interface they have cooked up is placated and decides to cough up the few lines of text you were looking for regarding the where, when, and who a movie's production history -- for example. 'Official' sites are the worst, and I usually try to avoid them altogehter, as they almost invariably insist on making you sit through a technicolor light show that you could probably care less about when all you want to know is what the system requirements are for that upcoming game you're interested in.
Don't get me wrong, I think that Gopher is far from being suitable for ALL types of applications, but it was, and is, a suitable method of delivery for what the internet was ostensibly about to begin with: information. Sites like Google and Wikipedia generally maintain an admirable level of minimalism, but venturing beyond them often leads to frustration, confusion, and (if you have a computer like mine) cpu/ram devouring effluvia. So yes, I feel a little nostalgic these days, and wish that Gopher had not all but died; instead, I wish it had become the protocol de jour of the universities and the other storehouses of worthwhile knowledge, while the web served as the giant waste-receptacle for all the inane tweets and gaudy Facebook gadgets.
/rant
Don't get me wrong, I think that Gopher is far from being suitable for ALL types of applications, but it was, and is, a suitable method of delivery for what the internet was ostensibly about to begin with: information. Sites like Google and Wikipedia generally maintain an admirable level of minimalism, but venturing beyond them often leads to frustration, confusion, and (if you have a computer like mine) cpu/ram devouring effluvia. So yes, I feel a little nostalgic these days, and wish that Gopher had not all but died; instead, I wish it had become the protocol de jour of the universities and the other storehouses of worthwhile knowledge, while the web served as the giant waste-receptacle for all the inane tweets and gaudy Facebook gadgets.
/rant