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Gopher: Underground Technology

Submitted by Karthik on 13 April, 2004 - 00:48

Wired is carrying an interesting story on the current state of the Gopher protocol. While, it mainly seems to be kept alive due to nostalgia, a few people see applications for Gopher in browsers for handhelds etc.

"Consider this example: Port-a-Goph, a gopher client in development for Palm OS. Cameron Kaiser wrote this in his spare time and got it working quickly on his own Palm," he said. "Contrast that with the state of Web browsing on handheld devices: Despite many years to improve them, I still regularly run across websites that simply do not render at all, or render so poorly that they are unusable."

Whatever its future, development for gopher continues. Late last month saw the release of a gopher module for Apache, allowing the popular open-source Web server to serve up gopher pages as well as Web pages.