Sender: Let's Go Gopherin' <GOPHERN@UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu>
From: richard smith <rjs@lis.pitt.edu>
Subject:      #25 The Limits of Gopher
To: Multiple recipients of list GOPHERN <GOPHERN@UBVM.cc.buffalo.edu>

NAVIGATING THE INTERNET: LET'S GO GOPHERIN'

Richard J. Smith and Jim Gerland

As promised (a 2 days late) here is our guest lecturer.

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Christinger Tomer is Assistant Professor, School of Library and
Information Science, University of Pittsburgh. Before joining the
faculty at Pittsburgh, he taught at several other institutions, mainly
Case Western Reserve University. He holds a bachelor's degree from the
College of Wooster and Master's and Ph.D degrees from CWRU. His
interests include the application of information technologies to
library services.

--------------------------------------------------------------------
THE LIMITS OF GOPHER

In terms of the applications developed in recent years to support
resource discovery and information retrieval over the Internet, the
University of Minnesota's Internet Gopher is arguably the most
important development.  Part of its importance owes to the scope of
deployment; a recent estimate fixed the number of active Gopher
servers worldwide well in excess of 1200. But the larger reason for
its importance is the more obvious one -- Gopher has made the Internet
both accessible and usable for large numbers of users, many of them
new users otherwise lacking the means to make extensive use of the
resources accessible to them.

Yet, as significant as it has been and remains today, Gopher is in
many ways already outmoded. Designed primarily as a document delivery
system, it lacks the finer granularity that many users require. Where
users were once satisfied, say, to identify the machines on which the
latest version of the manual for the Elm mail user agent resides,
today they want to be able to query an array of servers and retrieve
the relevant sections of the manual.  The availability of the search
engine known as Veronica has helped to a some degree, but the main
problem is that Gopher's designers did not outfit their system with
native mechanisms for more sophisticated forms of searching or
processing of comparatively more complex document types. (Although
release of the software to the Internet community clearly implied a
desire for deployment beyond the University of Minnesota system, that
the system is based on a simple, hierarchical file system suggests
that the designers of the original system did not envision supporting
a network of well over a thousand file servers scattered across a
global network.) The "Gopher+" enhancements, which rely on
transmitting tab-delimited fields beyond those specified by the first
generation of Gopher servers and clients, support the retrieval and
display of pictures, sounds, and motion video, but the basic Gopher
mechanisms remain fairly primitive and inflexible, with the bookmark
feature being the only significant option for customizing at the
client level.


NCSA MOSAIC AND THE NEXT GENERATION OF RESOURCE DISCOVERY TOOLS

However, the next generation of tools is already at hand. Perhaps the
most interesting of them is the National Center for Supercomputing
Application's Mosaic. Based on the so-called "WorldWideWeb"
technologies developed at CERN in Switzerland, Mosaic's developers
call it "a distributed hypermedia system designed for information
discovery and retrieval over the global Internet." (Marc Andreessen,
"Getting Started with NCSA Mosaic," Unpublished paper, National Center
for Supercomputing Applications.) Using the X Window system as its
interface, NCSA Mosaic unifies access to various protocols, data
formats, and archives, and provides interfaces to external viewers
designed to handle display formats other than the X bitmap, e.g.,
JPEG, TIFF, DVI, MPEG, and PostScript. For example, within the
framework provided by a single interface, a user may run a Gopher
session, instruct an Archie client to run a search, or retrieve images
from The Library of Congress's Vatican exhibit.

Mosaic's hypermedia capabilities are derived from the use of the
HyperText Markup Language (HTML). Based on the Standard Generalized
Markup Language SGML), the ISO standard for internal document
description, HTML uses tags to indicate formatting or structural
information. One of the structures HTML tags may specify is a link to
another document, which may situated on the same server or located
somewhere else on the network. Based on a single directive known in
the context of HTML as an "anchor," the tag points to a specific file
and provides the basis for a traversable link between the anchor and
the file to which the link points.

The operational significance of the embedded "anchors" is that, at
least in principle, files located anywhere on the Internet may be
linked, and that links may be added or deleted in accord with the
requirements of either document designers or end users. As a result,
Mosaic is capable of supporting several modes of asynchronous
collaboration, including document annotation, document crosslinking,
and document revision control. In addition, NCSA Mosaic can
communicate directly with Collage, which is NCSA's synchronous
collaboration tool intended mainly for use in scientific data analysis
and manipulation, and NCSA's Data Management Facility, which is a
relational database system designed especially for scientific data.
(One of the threads connecting Mosaic, the WorldWideWeb, and the
Internet Gopher is a scheme for document naming known as the Uniform
Resource Locator (URL). The URL has been described as "a networked
extension of the standard filename concept: not only can you point to
a file in a directory, but that file and that directory can exist on
any machine on the network, can be served via any of several different
methods, and might not even be something as simple as a file: URLs can
also point to queries, documents stored deep within databases, the
results of a finger or archie command, or whatever."  Perhaps more to
the point, the use of URLs and the deployment of a similar scheme for
resource naming represent key factors in further regularizing the
processes supported by tools like Gopher, WWW, and Mosaic.)


THE NEAR FUTURE

In the near term, we can expect that the Gopher system will be
superseded, albeit slowly, by Mosaic and similar applications. Already
there are Mosaic clients -- in effect, "proof-of-concept" applications
-- that will run successfully under Microsoft Windows 3.1 and
Macintosh System 7. The speed of this transition will depend in large
measure upon the capabilities of the local area networks from which
clients are launched and the processing capabilities of the computers
upon which those clients run. For example, so-called "fast Ethernet"
will support transfer rates of up to 100 megabytes per second. Coupled
with the next generation of desktop computers, which are expected to
be RISC machines, or the equivalent thereof, available network
bandwidth and local processing power should be great enough to support
a generation of robust resource discovery/retrieval tools based on or
emulating the X Window interface.

The more difficult question is how long it will be necessary to
support the several generations of machines built on the PC AT bus and
running versions of MS-DOS. However, as long as those machines
represent a significant factor, and it would seem at this point, given
their numbers, the state of the general economy, and the nature of
end-user computing, that these machines will be a significant factor
for at least another five years, the Internet Gopher and other
essentially low-end systems will remain a potent factor in this area
of network computing.



Thanks to Slippery Rock University's library and computer center
staff, and the State University of New York at Buffalo's School of
Information & Library Studies faculy for their assistance in helping
me continue the course while on the road.--Rich

Richard J. Smith
smithr@clp2.clpgh.org
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
or
rjs@lis.pitt.edu

Jim Gerland
gerland@ubvms.cc.buffalo.edu
State University of New York at Buffalo
Academic Services, Computing and Information Technology
.