> > Brandon Eich has spoken on 388195 and has stated
that gopher will disappear
> > in Mozilla 2, which means Firefox 3 will be the
final version with gopher
> > support. (And what a jerk he is. Wow. Did you read
his comments on SOAP?)
> > This is a crushing blow.
>
> To say the least. Right now I wonder if it's worth
continuing: we can
> forget about newbies who land on gopher sites more or
less by mistake
> or by clicking on a link just to see how it looks. And
no fresh blood
> means death, sooner or later.
This partially happened with IE, also, although IE was a
pretty sucky
client for a long time. But I agree, this is a big drain on
the curious.
People will actually have to *look* for a gopher client and
this won't
be compelling to the casual.
Naturally the Gopher Proxy will still be running, but with
no automatic
flow, that won't help very much as no one other than those
searching for
it will know to go there.
Part of this will require a public relations campaign to
publicize the EOL.
We lost the battle, but we can still win the war by getting
people who use
Gopher routinely to spread the word about alternatives. And
at least there
is a little time to play with -- thank goodness Gopher was
still in 3b1 or
we'd be totally up a creek.
> There is a question posted yesterday in
news:comp.infosystems.gopher
> asking about a proxy for Opera. What the hell should I
answer him?
> That he should use Firefox?
I saw that. I do note that there are some encouraging things
still, such as
there is still a gopher proxy setting in Mac OS X 10.4. Can
anyone confirm
it still exists in 10.5? Is there a similar option in
XP/Vista?
We may be able to exploit this for more transparent access.
> > At this point strategy needs to be discussed to
have a workable, deployable
> > modern client in place for when FF 3 becomes EOLed
in a couple years.
> >
> > As I see it, we have two options:
> >
> > - FF add-on. This has the advantages of
integration, but we have to play
> > in their sandbox, including dumbing down features
that don't work well in
> > a browser environment. However, a lot of work is
done for us, and it is
> > cross-platform. We would need someone/ a team with
good knowledge of how
> > to do this.
>
> This would help for simply legitimacy. People tend to
install Firefox
> extensions from the official Mozilla extension room,
but a .exe from
> dudes they don't even know, I think they'll be less
confident. They
> would just walk away.
That's certainly a valid point. It would have a greater
learning curve,
though. I've done a little work with customizing plug-ins
but I have never
written from scratch, and Moz 2 is going to be a different
architecture
in any case with some major and possibly fractured API
decisions.
> If we were able to come up with a JavaScript patch
maybe it would have
> been accepted. We will never know. The one thing that
is sure is that
> we had nothing to offer and now, Brandon Eich can say
"no free
> lunches". You couldn't do all the job yourself,
Cameron, and we
> failed to help you on this. Now, even if some people
developed an
> extension, I'd ask if it's really worth it: how many
people are going
> to install it anyway?
It wasn't your fault and I knew I had bit off more than I
could chew, but
we had to at least demonstrate the community was behind it.
Even with
reasonable XPCOM experience, though, I had no chance of
making 1.9.
Now that 2.0 is closed to us, it's the add-on route or the
custom client.
The reason I suggested AIR is that it does have direct
socket access and
that is definitely a big plus. I think people would be more
likely to run
an AIR app that's managed than a random .exe. However, that
also carries
the burden of installing Adobe AIR (free but another
download), and AIR has
not been a paragon of stability or efficiency thus far.
--
------------------------------------ personal: http://www.cameronkaise
r.com/ --
Cameron Kaiser * Floodgap Systems * www.floodgap.com *
ckaiser floodgap.com
-- Consider the lilac. And while you're doing that, I'll go
through your stuff.
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