"Welcome to the Wonderful World Wide Web" by Robert Goldstein
The ADN Connection, Sept/Oct 1994, U. of Illinois at Chicago
-------------------------------------------------------------

Reports of Gopher's Death are Premature

     Despite this glowing review of WWW, Gopher will not die a
quick death because it still retains some important advantages,
even aside from its installed base:

     Good hypertext is hard and very labor intensive. A human
brain has to decide how to mark the text, and that takes time.
Sure, there are automatic conversion programs for many formats,
but a good, clear document design still depends on real Homo
Sapiens, not just software. It is much easier to make plain text
available, and gopher has a natural simplicity in dealing with
plain text.

     The Gopher menu format might seem rigid, but it forces every
entry to have an associated title. Reasonable titles are clear and
descriptive, and they can be searched by programs like Veronica.
URLs embedded in HTML documents, in contrast, are not required to
have any associated description at all. The item a URL points to
might have a title, but you won't know what it might be until you
fetch it.

     WWW documents tend to become collections of small
subdocuments, all pointing to each other, whereas Gopher documents
tend to be larger, more cohesive pieces. This is perhaps an
overgeneralization, and neither scheme really forces a particular
style of document organization. The multiple subdocument structure
is well suited to hypertext manuals, where instant look up is
valuable, but it is less useful when one wants to print out the
whole set to get an overview. Also, the multiple document
collection needs to be well thought out, because each document
will be read in many different contexts.