Quirky urls
Sun, 26 Oct 2025 09:19:10 +0100
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Here's a qirk I came across today.

I'm running the Gophernicus Gopher  server, and I was wondering how
to write  spartan:// or gemini://  links in a gophermap  instead of
pretending they don't exist, or by using a html proxy.

It turns out that you can use the 'h' item type, for example:

    hSpartan Homepage   URL:spartan://mozz.us   
    hGemini Protocol    URL:gemini://geminiprotocol.net

This works  great if your  browser supports the spartan  and gemini
protocols, like Chawan does.

Pushing this  further, I replaced  the 'h'  item type with  'S' and
'G' and 'F' and it still worked. Hmm.

Reading the mailing list archives, it turns out that John Goerzen in
his 2002 proposal for url selectors indicated  'h'  for  html  urls,
he left it to the user to apply other selectors for other protocols.
The cannonical 'h' for selector urls is mistaken.

 ------
 Links to URLs from a gopher directory shall be defined as follows:

 Type -- the appropriate character corresponding to the type of the
 document on the remote end; h if HTML.

 Path -- the full URL, preceeded by "URL:".  For instance:
         URL:http://www.complete.org/

 Host, Port -- pointing back to the gopher server that provided
 the directory for compatibility reasons.

 Name -- as usual for a Gopher directory entry.
 -----

So I edited ~/.config/chawan/config.toml and added these types:

  a[item-type='G']::before { content: "[ GEM] "; }
  a[item-type='S']::before { content: "[SPAR] "; }
  a[item-type='F']::before { content: "[FING] "; }

IThe result is great, in Chawan... 	/images/protocols-in-chawan.png	spike.nagatha.fr	70

Lynx will  display (UNKN) and complain  about unsupported protocols
if you use the link.

These links won't work in older  gopher clients,  as only html urls
existed then, so only html was mistakenly accepted.

Personally, this is another nail  in the coffin for gopher browsers
that cannot support multiple protocols. We don't live in a goldfish
bowl, there's a whole world out there.

I also really like the idea of Gopher being the common denominator.

https://sr.ht/~bptato/chawan/
gopher://spike.nagatha.fr/0/phlog/2025-06-15-00-00-Howto-install-Chawan-on-Artix.txt


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