Re: gopher can read www links right now!

timbl (Tim Berners-Lee)
Date: Fri, 7 Feb 92 17:58:24 GMT+0100
From: timbl (Tim Berners-Lee)
Message-id: <9202071658.AA00861@ nxoc01.cern.ch >
To: emv@cic.net
Subject: Re: gopher can read www links right now!
Cc: www-talk



Begin forwarded message:

To: timbl@nxoc01.cern.ch
Subject: gopher can read www links right now!
Date: Fri, 07 Feb 92 09:15:54 -0500
From: emv@cic.net

> ho ho ho!  take a look at this:
> 

> www gopher://info.cern.ch:2784//GET%20/hypertext/WWW/FileFormat.html
> 

> accidental compatibility...

Ha!  There's a man who knows what's going on.... of course the slash just before
the GET is interpreted as a gopher type character which happens to be
invalid, so www just reads the document as plain text. With versiuon 1.1c or later  
(no, it's not released yet but I will if you want it), an "h" field means "html  
format". So I can say:(spot of the difference)

www gopher://info.cern.ch:2784/hGET%20/hypertext/WWW/FileFormat.html

File format

   The system uses marked-up text to represent a hypertext document when one is
   being stored in a file or transmitted over the network. Some of the formats
   available are illustrated in a test hypertext[1]. The hypertext mark-up
   language is an SGML format. This means basically that it uses angle brackets
   to delimit language constructs embedded within the text. The particular
   language 1 the set of tags and the rules about their use, and their
   significance 1 is not part of the SGML standard. There being no standard on
   this, we have adopted a set which seems sensible. Let's call them HTML --
   hypertext markup language. HTML is not an alternative to SGML, it is a
   particular format within the SGML rules (an SGML "DTD"). We have included in
   HTML  tags from the SGML tagset used at and once supported at CERN by  quite
   a lot of documentation and SGML examples.[2] The HTML parser will ignore
   tags which it does not understand, and will ignore attributes which it does
   not understand of CERN-SGML tags.
     [End]


Basically, Gopher addresses and w3 addresses are fairly interconvertable. And you  
are right, http and gopher protocols are very similar.  [The "w" field can only be  
used in a gopher menu. It means "The selector string is in fact a w3 address, don't  
expect a port number or host address to follow it".]