Visual navigation possibilities with GopherVR for Macintosh and Unix (fwd)

["C.K.Work" <[e-mail]>]

Jill Foster wrote ...
> 
> I know many of you have moved to WWW - but gopher and WWW keep
> leap-frogging each other. This announcement of GopherVR for Macintosh and
> Unix *enables* possibilities for visual navigation through the information
> space. There was a guy from BT at last year's user support workshop that
> talked about the BT (British Telecom for the non-UK members) research
> dept's work on visual navigation as an alternative method of displaying
> relationships between information.
> 

Speaking from a site which has just committed to WWW (more or less
bypassing Gopher) I'm intrigued to see that such effort is being put
into Gopher - the implicatation of the Jill's message is that gopher & WWW are 
alternate routes to the same end. Unless I'm misunderstanding things,
this is not the case. WWW as a technology surely offers much more than
Gopher can - both now, but perhaps more importantly in terms of scope
for development. At present Gopher space is effectively a subset of Web
space, and this will remain the case until Gopher clients can read html
(in which case won't they be Web clients?).

Granted, looking at the client end ONLY, it is possible that Gopher
clients may include features which make them easier/better/faster to
use, and for those with a serious investment in Gopher based services,
this is a good thing. But, if you were starting with a clean slate are
there any reasons to go down the gopher route rather than the Web route?

Everything I've seen would indicate that the only real future is with
Web - but I'm only too happy to be corrected on this! :)

Regards,

Colin 


-- 
_________________________________________________ 
Colin K. Work
Computing Services
University of Southampton

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