this post was submitted on 08 Oct 2025
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As we know it? It already has several times. How many of you out there are browsing the web using Gofer? The centralized oligarchcentric web that we know today needs to die and great new things are coming along to take its place. Returned to more sustainable collaborative websites and services. Like the fediverse.
Gopher predated the Web.
I do agree that there have been pretty major changes in the way websites worked, though. I'm not hand-coding pages using a very light, Markdown-like syntax with
<em></em>,<a href=""></a>, and<h1></h1>anymore, for example.That depends on how you define the web. If you only call the web the web when it was named the web and not what it was before it was named the web. Then yes you're correct that was before the web. The question is, is that a semantic or significant difference? ARPANET was still a web of interconnected systems. For an old goober like myself.who was using FidoNet net back in the mid 80s. And the actual internet in the late 80s, early 90s. I definitely remember Gophering on the Internet. Plenty of places still maintained gopher directories till the mid 90s.
Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gopher_(protocol)
gopher.floodgap.com is one of the last running Gopher servers, was the one that I usually used as a starting point when firing up a gopher client. It has a Web gateway up:
https://gopher.floodgap.com/gopher/
This has been mangled up by history. The important parts of the World Wide Web are having hypertext (basically links inside the document to other documents) and being networked (those links can take you to a completely different server). Apple's Hypercard had hypertext, but it wasn't networked. Usenet was networked, but had no hypertext.
This is laid out in Tim Berners-Lee's original 1989 proposal for the web while he was at CERN:
https://www.w3.org/History/1989/proposal.html
Gopher has all the qualities he was talking about. Gopher was a different kind of World Wide Web. We decided against that particular route, and for mostly good reasons, IMO.