Secondary Gopher Support in Web & Gemini Browsers
=================================================

I don't know if anyone else finds this interesting, but I've found
that when you view the source of a gopher menu in one of these
clients, what you find is...

Kristall (Gemini)
-----------------
The raw gophermap, complete with inline text prefixed with "i".
Most link types have their own icons. Presumably this means
it renders Gopher menus directly rather than converting them.

Lagrange (Gemini)
-----------------
A Gemtext page, with text lines as plain text and menu entries as
"=> URL Description" links. The external/internal icons and
color-coded protocols carry over from its Gemini theme, and
specific icons are shown for at least images and search.

Dillo (Web)
-----------
A fully-specified HTML page with an old school table layout
with two columns, one for the icons and one for the text. The icons
are embedded as data: URLs, and each line of text (linked or
otherwise) is wrapped in its own <pre>tag in its own table cell.
The raw gophermap code for each line appears in an HTML comment
before the table row. Most link types have their own icons, and
search links are shown with a text input field.

Lynx (Web)
----------
A bare-minimum HTML document with the menu rendered into a single
<pre> block. Link types are tagged with a short text label.

Dooble (Web)
------------
Extremely basic HTML (no doctype) that wraps everything in
<body style="font-family: monospace"> and puts <br> at the end of
each line. Links are plain text, with no indicator of what type
of selector. Search selectors are converted to simple HTML forms.
h...URL links aren't parsed, so they end up as broken links.

Netscape (Web, discontinued)
----------------------------
I remembered that back when it loaded Gopher menus and FTP
directories it also converted them to HTML and then rendered the
HTML. I thought it was simpler markup than Dillo's, but couldn't
remember. So I installed old copies of first Netscape 4.8 and then
2.0 into an XP-type Wine bottle. It won't work with modern HTTPS
sites, since it doesn't know any modern encryption algorithms,
but it works with plain HTTP and with Gopher.

As I'd thought, it's much simpler, more like the markup Lynx
generates: an <h1> for the title, then a big <pre> block with a
bunch of links in it. Not even an <html> or <body> tag. The images
are 'internal-gopher-menu', 'internal-gopher-text' and so forth,
and seeing that I remember an ill-advised attempt to use those
icons on a web page for efficiency, a plan which probably dissolved
the moment I opened the page in another browser.

I half suspect Netscape's approach was was coded before HTML had
tables, and never updated until it was eventually removed from
Firefox.

Mosaic (Web, discontinued)
--------------------------
I also installed a copy of NCSA Mosaic 3 into the same bottle.
Mosaic clearly converts the menus to HTML, but it doesn't show
internally-generated code in the source view. The resulting page
has a heading (probably an <h1>), but the rest of the text is in
a normal serif font, not a fixed-width font, with a file, folder,
binary, etc. icon in front of each line. Not using <pre> means
ASCII art is totally broken.

Worse, Mosaic parses text lines (type 'i' for 'info) as links,
prefixing them with a question mark icon, though of course the
links don't actually go anywhere.

At first it seemed weird that it would be broken that badly, but
I discovered that 'i' wasn't one of the official types. Now I want
to know when those "commonly-used non-canonical types" were
introduced and how they spread.

But that's another topic:
gopher://gopher.kvibber.com/0/gopher/noncanonical-gopher-types.txt

Kelson Vibber
2026-09-12, updated 2026-10-11