Re: OT: rude behaviour

On Sat, Nov 15 2025, cat K. wrote:

> while you are correct that the i in Gopher's itemtypes has been displayed by
> most clients for the past 20 years if you know your history you'll also know
> it's also not RFC compliant, it was not covered in the original spec and just

The RFC was never adopted as a standard (it was informational) and I
don't believe there has ever been a point in time where Gopher behavior
in practice was limited by RFC.

Just to name some examples - by 1992, which is before the RFC was
published, UMN gopher supported item types s, e, c, g, h, and M which
were not in the RFC.  Just to note, the same people that worked on UMN
gopher were the authors of RFC1436, so it's not that they weren't aware
of the state of Gopher.  

UMN gopher supported 'i' by at least January 1994, but the changelogs
imply it was earlier in the gopher 2.0 development cycle that it was
added.  I simply don't have the earlier 2.0 releases.

> maybe I should have been more succinct in saying most Gopher browsers do render
> it but don't handle or display it correctly. some ignore the escape and just

That's a bit of a stretch.  What character set do you use?  Note that
Gopher has no way of indicating that, and predates the wide usage of
Unicode.

Terminals now, and more notably then, do not have a uniform set of
standards on how to address color, underline, etc., nor even a uniform
set of capabilities in that way.

No matter what client I use, if I pull up that on my DEC vt510 it is
unlikely to display like you intended.

Basically, I think trying to argue whether something is "correct" based
on a protocol from 1994 that was implemented by de facto consensus
rather than committee-based standard is not going to get anyone
anywhere.  Then as now, some clients displayed type i and some didn't.

Neither was wrong.

As a side note, at the moment I can't tell if you are actively trying to
harm the Gopher community or get some weird pleasure pointless
arguments.  In either case, I'd kindly ask you reflect on your behavior
and whether it is really serving the ends you state you want to see.

John