Re: web

On 2025-01-19, yeti wrote:
Ben Collver <bencollver@tilde.pink> wrote:

 > Newsgroups: comp.infosystems,comp.misc

I took the liberty to disregard the crosspost.

 >> In short, gopher is not the web.  It does not use the HTTP protocol,
 >> the HTML format, nor other web standards such as Javascript.  Gopher
 >> is a separate protocol that is not directly viewable in mainstream
 >> browsers such as Chrome and Mozilla.

Gopher resources are indeed not directly viewable in /modern/
browsers, so I can agree they're not part of /modern/ web.

From where I stand, they're still part of the web at large.

As an aside, who decides what is or is not a /web/ standard?
If the suggestion is to only consider official W3C TRs as
"web standards proper" then, well, HTML is currently maintained
by WHATWG, not W3C; and HTTP/1.1 is IETF RFC 9112 / IETF STD 99.

 > I contradict.

 > When browsers appeared, we thought of the web as what was accessible
 > by them.  FTP, HTTP and Gopher were among this in the early days.

 > Gopher is not the web.  Yes.

 > HTTP is not the web!

 > They just are part of the web.

 > Today's big$$$-browsers converge to single protocol network file
 > viewers and unluckily the smallweb browsers do too.

That's how I see it as well.  I've been using Lynx for over
two decades now, and I have no trouble using it to read HTML
documents (local or delivered over HTTP/1; provided, of course,
they are documents, rather than Javascript programs wrapped
in HTML, as is not uncommon today), gopherholes, or Usenet
articles (such as news:87cygivmy3.fsf@tilde.institute I'm
responding to.)  It "just works."

I have no trouble understanding the difference between the web
proper and Internet as the technology it relies upon, either.

DNS is not web because even though it's essential for the web
as it is today to work, you can't point your browser, modern or
otherwise, to a DNS server, a DNS zone, or even an individual DNS
resource record (even though your browser /will/ request one from
your local recursive resolver, or its DNS-over-HTTP equivalent,
when you point it to a URL with a DNS name in that, be that
http://example.net/ or nntp://news.example.com/comp.misc .)

NTP is not web for much the same reason: there're no URIs for NTP
servers or individual NTP packets.  Neither are there URIs for
currently active TCP connections or UDP datagrams or IP hosts.

There /are/ URIs for email mailboxes (mailto:jsmith@example.net)
to send mail to, and phone numbers (tel:) to call, though.

To summarize, from a purely practical PoV, if you can access it
from /your/ browser, it is part of /your/ web.  From a conceptual
PoV, I'd define "web" as a collection of interlinked resources
identified by their URIs.  So, if it has an URI and that URI is
mentioned somewhere on the web, it's part of the web too.

Modern web is important because that's often where the people
you can talk to are.  But non-modern portions of the web could
be just as important, especially if it's where most of the
people you /actually/ talk to are.  Such as news:comp.misc .