# 2019-07-22 23:03:00.133769 UTC (+0000)

Bitreich now has a gopher validator/lint tool.

It checks raw Gopher directory data according to the official RFC1436
specification.

This lint-like tool might also open further discussion for improving Gopher for
the current times, clarify interpretations of the official spec or define them
more strictly. A few topics could be:

* Change: UTF-8 support (instead of Latin-1).
* Change: remove ".\r\n" behaviour for types like textfiles and treat it at the
  protocol level as binary.
* Clarify/define: define a more clear difference of glyphs vs codepoints vs
  bytes.

The source-code is available at:
git://git.codemadness.org/gopher-validator
git://bitreich.org/gopher-validator

It can be browsed at:
gopher://codemadness.org/1/git/gopher-validator
gopher://bitreich.org/1/scm/gopher-validator

Suggestions and patches are welcome.

Some of the protocol discussions will be at Bitreichcon 2019.

Kind regards,
Hiltjo