Why display the file type anyway?
Sat, 01 Nov 2025 12:00:16 +0100
+-----------------------------------------------------------------+

After messing around with css this morning, I started wondering why
the filetype is displayed in Gopher at all.

In the days when Gopher was an FTP upgrade and 6 filetypes  battled
it out, perhaps it made sense. Nowdays Gopher clients  and  servers
cannot possibly display acronyms for every existing file type. 

The limited canonical file types originally set for Gopher  is  the 
source of many later  non-canonical derivations, or simply ignored.

If ~.mailcap is set up correctly, and macros  exist  for  filtering
various files, why display the file type?
It's as if the  web  put  "ATTENTION! THIS IS AN HTML FILE"  before 
every link. 

It has become anachronic eye candy.

gopher://spike.nagatha.fr/I/images/chawan-gopher-css-4.png
gopher://spike.nagatha.fr/I/images/chawan-gopher-css-3.png

 
␌