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Gopher

Gopher is a precursor to the Web that views information as a hierarchy of menus, which may contain text and other format files. It is still in widespread use. Gopher items can be specified as:

    gopher://host[:port]/[type[item]]

The standard port for Gopher servers is 70 and if this is used then it does not have to be specified. Gopher uses the concept of a selector to refer to the type of a resource and its pathname. The type value is encoded as a single character, the most common being 0 for text files and 1 for menus. The type is explicitly included both as the first character of the pathname, or item, and as a separate field, and thus occurs twice after the host name.

An example of a Gopher URL is:

    gopher://gopher.micro.umn.edu/11/

This refers to the top-level Gopher menu at gopher.micro.umn.edu, and could be abbreviated by dropping the trailing 11/.

Spinning the Web by Andrew Ford
© 1995 International Thomson Publishing
© 2002 Andrew Ford and Ford & Mason Ltd
Note: this HTML document was generated in December 1994 directly from the LaTeX source files using LaTeX2HTML. It was formatted into our standard page layout using the Template Toolkit. The document is mainly of historical interest as obviously many of the sites mentioned have long since disappeared.