I suspect the biggest reason the WWW won over Gopher is simply because it has features people want. I know that many people who like Gopher like it because of its lack of features, but this is a self-selected community that isn’t representative of everyone.
The only real way to read Gopherpages is with monospaced text for example. That’s not very typography. There’s a long list of other quite simple things that Gopher is lacking. From the first days the WWW allowed people to create the same kind of layout they would create on paper. Gopher is extremely constrained compared to that.
I don’t think that “adversarial interoperability” really comes in to play here.
I do think Gopher has some good ideas, and I’d love to have an “enhanced Gopher” which solves some of these issues, but I also know that at least a subset of the Gopher community is strongly against this.
Today’s Web giants want us to believe that they and they alone are suited to take us to wherever we end up next.
Part of the appeal of the WWW in the early days was the total freedom to create and publish content from my universities ~ directory. I never even knew if I could do the same with Gopher at the time. The system felt much more locked down.
I suspect the biggest reason the WWW won over Gopher is simply because it has features people want. I know that many people who like Gopher like it because of its lack of features, but this is a self-selected community that isn’t representative of everyone.
The only real way to read Gopherpages is with monospaced text for example. That’s not very typography. There’s a long list of other quite simple things that Gopher is lacking. From the first days the WWW allowed people to create the same kind of layout they would create on paper. Gopher is extremely constrained compared to that.
I don’t think that “adversarial interoperability” really comes in to play here.
I do think Gopher has some good ideas, and I’d love to have an “enhanced Gopher” which solves some of these issues, but I also know that at least a subset of the Gopher community is strongly against this.
But yeah, I totally agree with this sentiment.
Part of the appeal of the WWW in the early days was the total freedom to create and publish content from my universities
~directory. I never even knew if I could do the same with Gopher at the time. The system felt much more locked down.