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Comment by MistahKoala | Hacker News Reader

The article discusses reviving gopher, but doesn't mention how to access it (sure, I could invest a bit of time and effort googling how to do that, but that seems beside point for an article evangelising its revival).

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Yes, I was a little disappointed by that too. It even has a "gopher://..." link at the end and when I click on it I can't even open it. Just tell me how I can open the one example you provide man!

I use lynx to view gopher content, although I did write a gopher client in ruby with ncurses at one point for fun.

There was a time when gopher: scheme URLs would just work, because GOPHER support was built in to popular WWW browsers. Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer both had it, for example.

It's not that gopher: is some novelty that no-one has ever adopted. It's that a WWW browser nowadays lacks quite a lot of things that used to be commonly built-in to WWW browsers. gopher: scheme support has gone completely, as has news: support. ftp: support has been reimplemented several times, and is significantly poorer now than it used to be.

* http://jdebp.eu./FGA/web-browser-ftp-hall-of-shame.html

At the risk of shameless self-promotion, there are Firefox add-ons and at least several mobile clients. Disclaimer: I wrote a number of the ones on this page.

https://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/

(Yes, it's accessible over Gopher too, just to be difficult)

This thread points to a few Gopher clients. I like:

http://runtimeterror.com/tools/gopher/

It's cross-platform: I use the statically linked Linux binary. Loads very quickly, like Dillo. Author commented on HN once on something unrelated and I stumbled across it on his site. Doesn't do images (yet) and I just discovered that it doesn't let me highlight text (bummer) but overall... nice client to have.

Hopefully the author (runtimeterror) continues to work on 'Little Gopher'.

This is what OP's linked gopher page looks like:

http://i.thinimg.com/img/7ann.png

The article's author: true to his word. Still keeping his gopher page current - with the latest post updated 11jan2019.

Can the visual styles be set by the page, or is it client-side?

As mentioned, Lynx still supports the protocol. It's an easy protocol to implement [1] such that you could possibly write on in shell using little more than `nc`, `less` and possibly some `awk` (or similar) to format the index pages (it's mostly text anyway).

[1] I wrote about the technical differences between http and gopher http://boston.conman.org/2019/01/12.2

nor does it try to explain what it actually is and why someone would need to care, let alone actually use it.

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