[Nautilus-list] Gopher+ as Nautilus' sidekick buddy?

[Stefan Rieken <StefanRieken SoftHome net>]

OK this mail is going to be a bit of a whiner, but I'll send it anyway.

As you may have noticed when you were looking hard enough, I released
version 0.1 of my Gnopher (= Gopher for GNOME) program yesterday. My end
target (somewhere around 2.0) would be to have a complete implementation
of the Gopher+ protocol for Nautilus. But that is in due time.

I am currently not developing on/ for/ with Nautilus, and I do have
serious plans to wait until there is a stable development API, and, even
more important to me, an easy install (not bugging with Evolution
versions etc.). That's not meant to complain or something; I think
you'll agree with me that waiting with writing components until a
release makes some sense.

There is, however, one thing about which I wonder "would Nautilus 1.0 be
able to do this?" and I want to be sure it will, so that it wouldn't
require some kind of API hack in the stable release (which wouldn't be
"allowed" anymore then).

First, let me explain that IMHO, Gopher+ would be an ideal sidekick
buddy for Nautilus, as it supports extensive metadata and "view as..."
stuff. We all know that HTML nor FTP do this kind of tricks (so actually
they suck for Nautilus net-protocols ;-P). I can see people setting up
Gopher+ servers and Nautilus clients, it would be information heaven.

OK, so let's stop dreaming. What exactly can Gopher+ do? Ehhmmm
(browsing through the specs):

On the metadata front:
* regular file information (selector (= filename/ directory), host,
  port) plus a short description (which is nicer to present than the dry
  filename)
* who is in charge of the file (Administrator), modification date
* relevance ranking with search results (you can search with Gopher)
* Site name, organisation, location, geographic location, timezone,
  provider, author, creation date, expiration date
* Different MIME types available for this file (Views)
* Different languages for this file (ISO 639 language code)
* Abstract: a short description of the item
* ....you can add your own extensions

This kicks HTTP's because nobody's stopping you from using HTML combined
with this (plus there's also a CGI-like extention in Gopher+) but also
noone is forcing HTML upon you; as you can read there is excellent
directory display support.

On the Views front: well, as you might already have seen, the Views
allow you to download one file in different languages, different
formats, etc.

So what I was really wondering is: can Nautilus support one file having
multiple MIME types? That is the most important thing to me. So that you
are able to see just one file, and have a lot of "View as..." items for
it.

Of course it'd also be cool if there was room in Nautilus for supporting
multiple language selections and downloads, the Abstract, display of
other metadata (Nautilus extended metadata?), etc. etc.

So maybe you can now see why I'm so enthousiast about Nautilus doing
Gopher+. In fact, Nautilus and Gopher+ share much the same ideals,
Nautilus being a kewl filemanager, and Gopher+ being but a dry protocol.

A marriage made in heaven?

Please CC: your responses; I am not on this list.

Thanks,

Stefan