beginners.txt - gopher-tutorials - The gopher tutorials project.
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beginners.txt (2748B)
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1 Hello dear reader,
2
3 if you have heard about gopher and want to explore its space but feel
4 lost about how to achieve that, this text is for you. We will assume
5 that you have no technical skill so everyone can read this.
6
7 Gopher is the name of a protocol for sharing text, images or any kind
8 of file. A network protocol is a set of rules which allow to create a
9 common service for different people, everyone needing to respect
10 thoses rules to be able to communicate with each other. Some people
11 writing code (called Developers) will write "Clients" software for the
12 end-user and others developers will write "Servers" software which
13 will allow to publish content. The gopher protocol is so simple that
14 anyone with basic knowledge of computer science can write its own
15 client or server easily. Using gopher implies to understand the
16 protocol itself, but we promise it's really easy.
17
18 Gopher is an enjoyable way to browse informations. Every gopherhole
19 [that is the name given to someone's gopher content] looks like
20 another one. There is no way to customize a gopherhole display except
21 from the text. While this can look a bit harsh, this makes gopher
22 universal. If you know how to browse one gopherhole, you will know how
23 to browse all others because the way to do it is consistent.
24
25 So, let's speak about how gopher works. First, gopher requires 3
26 informations if you want to get content. You will need a remote
27 address to connect to [it's called an hostname, like "floodgap.com"],
28 the data type and a path to the data. The url looks like this :
29
30 gopher://hostname/type/path
31
32 The most important type is the type 1, which is the gopher menu
33 type. A gopher menu is an index made of differents lines, each line
34 having a type field to know what kind of data it leads to. It will
35 allow you to browse from menu to menu or from a menu to a content
36 (image, text, music, archives...).
37
38 Here is the list of the most used data types allowed on gopher, the
39 complete list is defined in a document named RFC 1436 which defines
40 the gopher protocol :
41
42 - type i is a line of text in the menu, it's not a link
43 - type 0 is a link to a text document
44 - type 1 is a link to another gopher menu
45 - type 3 means an error
46 - type 7 (search) asks a text input and lead to another menu
47 - type 9 is a link to a binary file (data archives, music...)
48 - type g is a link to a GIF file (animated picture)
49 - type I is a link to an image file
50 - type h is a link which lead to use another protocol (irc, http...)
51
52 Only the types menu and search can lead to another content. Asking
53 another type will lead to downloading a file.
54
55 Now that you are ready to browse the gopher space, we recommend you to
56 read the others tutorials about the gopher client software you would
57 like to use.