[ih] "The Internet runs on Proposed Standards"

[Brian E Carpenter]

On 07-Dec-22 13:19, Grant Taylor via Internet-history wrote:
> On 12/5/22 10:39 AM, Dave Crocker via Internet-history wrote:
>> Back then, Gopher was much easier to get a (text) page up and available.
>> And there were lots of existing text documents.
> 
> I question the veracity of that.  But I have no first hand experience
> hosting Gopher.
> 
>> The Web had a much richer presentation appearance but existing documents
>> needed to be translated into html.
> 
> The number of PDFs, PS, JPG, GIF, et al. files that I've downloaded beg
> to differ with the need to be translated into HTML.

Ditto plain text. You don't need any HTML statements whatever, and certainly nothing like a CSS, to access and render plain text via HTTP. That was true in 1994 and it's still true today. But of course, in 1994, most documents were neither plain text nor PDF. They were paper, or possibly a proprietary format such as .doc or .lwp. That must have presented a problem to gopher and wais as much as to the Web.

(At CERN our "official" markup then was SGML/Bookmaster, which was relatively easy to convert to HTML, and in fact it was because of this that Tim and Robert Cailliau knew to make HTML a dialect of SGML.)

    Brian