nostalga rocks! – back when >I< was a kid…

nostalga rocks! – back when >I< was a kid…

When
I was a boy of 14 we didn’t have the net like you kids do today. Nope. We
had text and we were damn glad of it. None of this
fancy graphic stuff, or the fast connections, or more than 64K of ram or any
of it. 40 characters wide we were of screaming information. It was important
stuff… it was crucial… it was….

Well. It was ASCII
porn is what it was.

Oh, and we argued about whether safewords
were important or not.

Anyway, we didn’t have the "web" to speak of. We had a collection
of other things that turned into stuff you know of now in some form or another.
BBS‘s
for discussion, usenet
news readers for more discussion and something called "Gopher"
for what you think of as web pages.

Gopher was OK… it let people dump the contents of a lot of documents online
and that was a good thing. It had very little in the way of formatting and only
rudimentary ideas of linking. That was a bad thing. It also completely lacked
any of the technical extensibility that let’s us actually USE the web.

So obviously just like your grandfather speaks well about coal as a home heating
source, some techno-luddites are trying to roll back the clock and bring
back Gopher. They even have a manifesto.

Their battle cries go something like this…

"While I agree with your point that the WWW is in a terrible
state, that’s mostly due to a bunch of overpaid graphics designers, and
due to a browser war that emphasized graphical designs. It is not the fault
of the web. The web can be all gopher is, and more. Much more." – link

Those bastards! You mean that some people actually care about the information
that is given in how the primary data payload is presented?! Here is a clue
– while bad design sucks… good design can enhance understanding.

"The reasons I want to see gopher make a comeback:

1. Simple navigation without having to wait for 500000000M of images
to load while looking for information [I, as well as many others out here
in the country, have slow connection speeds on everything]

2. None of this over-hyped hypertext
shit. Of course, you *can* use certain gopher servers [like gn] for web
servers, but they fulfill their purposes quite nicely without having to
push for that

3. It’s a hell of a lot more simple than HTTP and other protocols
of the same line." – link

I am particularly fond of the phrase "this over-hyped hypertext shit".
Look at this page. Do I look like the kind of man who has a problem
with hyperlinks?
Sheesh, I am the most linked guy I know.

"The problem with non linear, hyperlinked information is that
it practically enforces casual skimming as opposed to reading in depth[*].
Its no accident web sites are dumbed down, you know. This is also why I
have problems with web content in school curriculums; I’m not sure I want
any of my kids being taught attention disorder, for lack of a better word.

[*] "I’ll read this later, there’s still a few more links
to follow," kind of thing. Its hard to absorb good information off
the web, isnt it? How many of you have read 1/100th of your book marked
pages? Not many, I bet. I’ve often found myself spending more time gathering
links than actually reading the information I originally sought."
– link

So – the answer to his inability to maintain a train of thought is obviously
to cripple the technology. Right.

The purpose of all of this comes down to people who are confused or annoyed
about flexibility wanting to try and cripple the systems that led to the web’s
success so that they can surf the ‘net on a 1200baud modem without being confused
by all those nasty options.

To hell with that. I agree with this guy’s post…

"The Gopher manifesto itself had tons of URLs in it. And you
couldn’t click on those URLs. Oh yeah, that’s one of those great features
of Gopher – it doesn’t support links.

Almost seems like people are asking for Gopher because of things it _can’t_
do, not the things it can do. You might as well just ask for a crippled
web browser and web server. It’s easier to get those. Or just surf with
stuff off. I do that very often and the sites I find useful work just
fine.

While you guys are at it, you might as well start a "bring back
telex campaign". Doh." – link

What I resent most is the inherent assumption that graphics, interactivity
and layout are somehow secondary issues – or that they are inherently bad things.
I look around the web and I see some truly amazing things being down with design
and advanced features. Things that radically enhance the content of the sites
in question or make possible entire ways of conveying meaning.

Design is crucial to information transfer. Always has been. Always will be.

So, you Gopher freaks are welcome to surf the ‘net without links, without graphics,
without any formatting of any kind – and while your at it do it in the traditional
green and black text.

For me, I will happily explore what is possible with more options.

BTW – Gopher did have one good point. Even though it lacked internal linking
you could link to other documents and those links were shown at the bottom (usually)
of the screen… all in one place. I like that. I have been thinking about some
sort of way for my users to see all the links from the current page in one place
in addition to the links being shown as normal. Not sure how to do it
yet 🙂

Night!