# Gopher, HTML and the 90s Web Aesthetic

HTML is a non-canonical gopher item type (h), but is supported by
most clients, even the original gopher client. I think HTML pages
are a neat way to capture the 90s web aesthetic without leaving the
gopher protocol. An example I found of just this is at the
Endangered Software Society gopher site [0], which has a fravia.org
archive from 1999 [1], viewable entirely over gopher.

For those who don't know, fravia.org was a popular reverse
engineering site in the 90s, created by Francesco Vianello (aka
+Fravia) [2]. I can remember going through the site myself via
dialup, taking in everything I could so I could crack shareware
programs.

While the site's pages are certainly viewable in console browsers,
to really do them justice requires an older GUI browser. On my
Debian Lenny desktop in Iceweasel 3.0.6, you get the full 90s web
experience natively via gopher [3].

I've talked before about how we shouldn't treat gopher like the web,
mainly in the context of type 1 text documents used for
link-embedding [4], this would seem to be a good compromise. It's
also a good alternative to text conversion of HTML, especially for
sites (like this one) where part of the appeal is visual.

As I mentioned above, even the original gopher client properly
handles type 'h' selectors - by passing off the HTML to your default
browser (lynx on my older Debian system, or the program defined in
the GOPHER_HTML environment variable) [5]. Passing off the HTML
parsing and display like this also appeals to my sense of simplicity
and "one tool for one job" unix mentality.

From the 'about' text on the fravia archive landing page [6]:

> ...but the feeling is not the same when accessing these sites
> through a modern browser. But what if someone were to serve a
> sampling of these sites through Gopher, simultaneously preserving
> the Web's history while presenting an alternative history where
> HTML was served by Gopher!?

I'd love to see more of this!

[0]: gopher://gopher.endangeredsoft.org
[1]: gopher://gopher.endangeredsoft.org/1/90sweb
[2]: gopher://gopherpedia.com/0/Fravia
[3]: gopher://sdf.org/I/users/thinknix/images/iceweasel-fravia-90s-web.jpg
[4]: gopher://sdf.org/0/users/thinknix/glog/gopher-annoyances.md
[5]: gopher://sdf.org/I/users/thinknix/images/original-gopher-client-html-selector.jpg
[6]: gopher://gopher.endangeredsoft.org/0/90sweb/about.txt