From: catwheezel@operamail.com 
  
 On 2008-03-24, Chris Barts  wrote: 
 > Whiskers  writes: 
 > 
 >> 
 >> Gopher seems tailor-made for 'smart phones'  :))  (If someone ported the 
 >> software, of course ...). 
 > 
 > I don't know. The iPhone seems to do just fine with HTTP and the Web in 
 > general. Don't make the mistake of designing protocols around the 
 limitations 
 > of current hardware. (Or, in this case, not-so-current hardware. Gopher 
 > is well-suited to the limits of phones a few generations behind the curve.) 
 > 
 > More to the point, very little is in Gopherspace at this point. The gopher 
 > archive sites were (apparently) hopping places until about 1993-1994, but 
 > practically none of them have been updated since. It's interesting for 
 > historians and nostalgia buffs, but the information is mostly on the web 
 now. 
  
 'Low bandwidth' and 'small storage footprint' will always be desirable 
 features - even if 'most people' don't know any better than 'the web'. 
 The main difficulty for protocols such as gopher, FTP, and usenet, is that 
 they don't give much scope for advertising so they don't grab the 
 attention of commercial enterprises whose blinkers are directed at the use 
 of advertising as "the" way to generate income from the internet.  (The 
 fact that public fee-charging news servers still exist shows that at least 
 some end users are willing to pay to go straight to the content or service 
 they want without having to dig through heaps of adverts for something 
 'free'). 
  
 -- 
 -- ^^^^^^^^^^ 
 --  Whiskers 
 -- ~~~~~~~~~~ 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)