25 Years of Linux and the World Wide Web.

Posted Sep 7, 2016 8:48 UTC (Wed) by anselm (subscriber, #2796)
In reply to: 25 Years of Linux and the World Wide Web. by chfisher
Parent article: 25 Years of Linux — so far

Which would have been a bit silly given that one could write a basic Gopher server in half an afternoon and it would take perhaps three screens' worth of code.

I think one of the main advantages of the WWW over Gopher – at least with the advent of the likes of NCSA Mosaic – was that it made page-embedded hyperlinks and graphics a thing (although technically you could argue that these were features of HTML and it would have been perfectly possible to serve HTML over Gopher, which later versions of the Gopher protocol in fact allowed). Other drawbacks of Gopher included not having an equivalent to URLs, and only a very limited selection of allowable content types. In the end, Gopher was really too primitive to win.