A Beginner's Guide to the Internet/INTERNET.ISO/text/gopher/gophern/gophern.25

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From: richard smith <[e-mail]>
Subject:      #25 The Limits of Gopher
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NAVIGATING THE INTERNET: LET'S GO GOPHERIN'

Richard J. Smith and Jim Gerland

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

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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.

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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
[e-mail]
The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh
or
[e-mail]

Jim Gerland
[e-mail]
State University of New York at Buffalo
Academic Services, Computing and Information Technology