User solderpunk wrote a great piece of potential changes to 
gopher[1]. The last line reads "I will come at you in a
dark alley with a bladed instrument." You should read the 
rest, so you can be sure to avoid this particular end.

I'd line up behind solderpunk's banner, as defined in his 
post, in a heartbeat.

There is one thing that bothers me about RFC 1436. On page 4 
it reads:

"The first character on each line tells whether the line
describes a document, directory, or search service... The 
first character of the line is really defining the type of 
item described on this line."

All other characters after the first and up to the first tab 
describe the selector (a "title" of sorts.) Then you have 
various technical items, seperated by tabs. None of this is 
news.

What I don't quite understand is, why did they limit the 
item type to a single character, and even that not being 
seperated by a tab like everything else? Instead of that, 
they could have simply stated that all characters up to the 
first tab define the type of item. Then, the item type could 
be any number of characters, including just one single 
character. That would be a lot more extensible, and a lot 
easier on the eyes ultimately.

Yeah, it's not an earth-shattering change, nor is it 
technically impressive. But it would be cleaner, easier to 
understand, and more sensical. The only issue with it, I 
think, would be that it would break old gopher clients... 
and that alone might make it a deal-breaker.


[1] gopher://circumlunar.space:70/0/~solderpunk/phlog/on-gopher-conservatism.txt