* <> Gopher Nav Is Killer I always start browsing Gopher sites with a niggling little feeling in the back of my head that the interface isn't that good, that stacks of pages of single-column text is not at all optimal for site navigation, that tabs/multiple windows must be better, right? Parallelism over serialism! But I'm wrong! And I'm wrong because navigating Gopher sites is FAST. Damned-near instantaneous. It boggles the mind, the speed with which I can rip through documents and sites in Lynx or any other console-mode Gopher client. We navigate Gopher sites as though each page is a room, and there's at least one door back to the room you came from, and any number of additional doors into other rooms. It's an arbitrarily deep tree structure, but from the user's perspective it abstracts to the room-and-doors spatial metaphor quite naturally. Navigating the Web can be thought of in the same way, really. In early Web days, it felt very much the same, although there was always one difference: in Gopher, you can always go "up" to an index; on the Web, there is no "up". So, navigating a tree structure is, really, very natural for most people, and when you can do it almost as fast as you can press the keys, man... surfing Gopher is heaven compared to the Web. -- Excerpted from: PUBLIC NOTES (H) http://alph.laemeur.com/txt/PUBNOTES-H ©2017 Adam C. Moore (LÆMEUR)