Gopher addresses

The gopher protocol is a popular one for campus-wide information systems. The gopher information space consists of documents,and menus, which are lists of links to menus and documents.

The gopher address is effectively that information which is contained within a link, which is

The server host name
The server TCP port number
A single-character data type
An opque "selector" string which is passed to the server

WWW encodes thisinformation into a single string using its usual syntax. The result is much more usable than an FTP address in that the type information allows a retrieval to be done and the document to be displayed in an appropriate way.

Example:

		"gopher://info.cern.ch/11About This Gopher"

		"gopher://info.cern.ch:70/   1   1About This Gopher"
				|      |     |       |
			       host    |     |    selector string
				       |     |
				     port    type field (one character)

(up to existing , on to WAIS)

Tim BL