First a quick thanks to Logout for his phlog aggregator 'bongusta'
[0]. This is a great resource, if anyone reading wants to get their
phlog on his list, let him know, he has a contact email on his phlog
[1].

Ze Libertine Gamer comments on security and gopher [2]. I like his
idea of item types handing off functionality to outside
utilities. As he notes, it is very Unix-like and doesn't mess with
the gopher protocol itself.

Solderpunk offers up the idea of a HTTP client that enforces a
strict subset of HTML5, and a community of sites built around this
simple design [3]. This does have several big advantages:

- Native support for TLS
- Indexing by major search engines
- Pages are accessible to anyone without a proxy (assuming 'anyone'
  here means non-technical folks who might want to read your
  content)

On the other hand, staying with gopher has a number of advantages:

- No support for TLS
- No indexing by major search engines
- Pages are not accessible to everyone unless they use a proxy or
  can grok basics of the shell

Slightly tongue-in-cheek, as I'm cherry-picking to list items that
can reasonably be seen by our community in both ways. For example, I
think gopher needs full-text search, so I can't claim that as an
advantage, as much as I'm not unhappy that my gopher site is nowhere
listed in Google's search results. And presumably the subset of
HTML5 would have full CGI support, allowing for the use of libraries
that facilitate security.

I'm also not convinced SSL support is needed for gopher, although I
do agree the commenting facility based on item type 7 is insecure by
design. It can be made much less so by ruthlessly filtering what is
essentially a plaintext GET request. But this requires diligence on
the part of the programmer.

So I'm intrigued by both ideas, and perhaps they don't have to be
mutually exclusive. I've been thinking a simpler gopher -> HTTP
proxy is needed, the one I'm using [4] relies on javascript to
render the content. Ideally the proxy would work 100% server-side,
not client-side, and would output the simple subset of HTML5
Solderpunk mentions. Floodgap's lite gopher proxy [5] fits that
bill, I think - but the source code is not available.

[0] gopher://i-logout.cz/1/en/bongusta/
[1] gopher://i-logout.cz/1/en/phlog/
[2] gopher://zelibertinegamer.me/0/phlog/2017-08-06_1851.txt
[3] gopher://sdf.org/0/users/solderpunk/phlog/quick-gophery-thoughts.txt
[4] http://slugmax.tx0.org
[5] http://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/gw.lite