Tracking Down Non-Canonical Gopher Types
========================================

When I investigated how various web browsers and Gemini clients
convert Gopher menus for display, I found that Mosaic converted
'i' lines into broken links instead of just displaying the text.

Apparently 'i' was never an official part of the Gopher spec,
but became widely used somwhere along the line.

https://archives.somnolescent.net/web/gopherinfo/structure-of-a-menu/#itemtypes

Of course I wanted to know when those "commonly-used non-canonical
types" were introduced, and how they became common.

'i' / 'info text'
-----------------

I didn't find much in my own search, so I asked about 'i' on the
GeminiSpace BBS. A reply pointed to this Gemlog post that tracked
down the history of Gopher's 'i' a few years back.

gemini://mozz.us/journal/2021-05-27.gmi

Apparently it originated with a fork/re-implementation called
Panda out of the University of Iowa back in 1992. They gave a
presentation at GopherCon, and the consensus was that adding
explanatory text to a menu was the best feature from their version.

So that explains where Netscape picked it up from. Apparently IE
didn't support it, probably because it was based more directly on
Mosaic.

mozz.us was not able to find how much adoption it saw in the 1990s,
but mentions that it became "hugely popular" during the 2000s
revival.

------------------
'h' / 'HTML document'

The other one I'm curious about is 'h', which was initially used to
indicate an HTML file, and has since by convention become the way
to link to a website or other protocol.

But that'll have to wait until I have time to go down another
rabbit - er, gopher - hole.

Kelson Vibber
2026-09-19