That way clients can add value to the interface to that protocol.
Overloading gopher: is absolutely the *wrong* solution to the problem.
> >Setting up more servers (finger gateways) is anti-scalable and
> >doubles the load on the net. I'd much prefer the gopher hack to
> >that.
This isn't wholly true (for all interfaces). E.g., you still need at
least a face server (something I would like to see happen) for the client
to access if you want to have that type of interface (and I do :). Using
the "finger gateway" model the interface is defered to the server doing
the work so you get that for "free" (not to mention the ability to support
different kinds of finger interfaces from all clients and eventually things
like language and format negotiation).
I would vote for a finger: protocol setup such that the clients could
"punt" to a finger gateway (via something like a WWW-FINGER-PROXY
environment setting) if they didn't want to implement the protocol.
--sanders