The gopher.pl gateway

Note : I don't have a cool name for the thing - let's call it gopher.pl .

What is gopher.pl

This is a gopher gateway for Plexus. It supports some of the gopher+ extensions. Of course I know that XMosaic itself supports gopher. Sometimes this gateway even looks like the XMosaic-builtin gopher. This gateway supports the gopher+ interactive query enhancments and delivers every Gopher+ view as an entry.

Installing gopher.pl

The file gopher.pl usually resides in the $http_sdir/contrib directory. The following entries in the file $http_sdir/local.conf allow activation and customization : 
map     gopher          gopher.pl       &do_gopher($rest,$query)
This makes the gopher module available to plexus. 

set     gopher_use_forms        0
This variable says gopher.pl, whether it should generate <FORM> tags. These tags currently are only processed by the third prerelease of XMosaic 2.0. I don't recommend using this but for development. It is a logical variable, so 0 means no and 1 means yes. 
set     gopher_use_internal_images      0
This variable says gopher.pl, whether it should use images, which are stored internal in XMosaic for the builtin gopher interface. These images are used as small icons indicating the type of the gopher menu entry. If this variable is set to true, a non-XMosaic client may do silly things.

Using gopher.pl

Constructing an URL is the tricky part. I suggest that you only construct an URL to the root document by hand. After this, the gateway will show you the URL's of its links. A URL for gopher.pl consists of two parts : the first part specifies the location of the gateway, and the second specifies the location of the gopher document.

The first part looks as usual, for instance : http://www.inf.tu-dresden.de/gopher/ . The second part contains the gopher descriptor. The tabs are replaced by &11 . This looks like &11&11gopher.inf.tu-dresden.de&1170&11&11 . The first and second field are empty for a root document. The third field contains the hostname, the fourth the port number.

Examples

  • A root document
  • Dictionaries
  • Finding/Converting german ZIP codes

    • Sven Rudolph