Thursday, August 08, 2019
Unfortunately, my blog on Gopher is a second class citizen
I will be the first to admit that my blog on gopher is a second-class citizen. When I wrote the gopher server I took the quickest and easiest way to adapt my blog to a (close enough) text-only medium by feeding requests through Lynx. Note I didn't say “well done” (of course not! I said it was a “medium!” Ba-dum-bump! I'll be here all week! Don't forget to tip the wait staff!) or even pretty.
For instance, this entry looks like this via gopher:
Extreme contradiction, Brevard edition
So Bunny and I came across this lovely bit of signage in downtown
[1]Brevard:[“The white zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only.
There is no stopping in the red zone.” / “The red zone is for immediate
loading and unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the white
zone.” / “No, the white zone is for loading of passengers and there is no
stopping in a RED zone.” / “The red zone has always been for loading and
unloading of passengers. There's never stopping in a white zone.” / “Don't
you tell me which zone is for loading, and which zone is for stopping!”]So which is it? Loading, or parking? Or loading of wheelchairs for parking?
Or parking for wheelchairs to be loaded? I'm so confused!References
1. https://www.cityofbrevard.com/
First off, there's no indication that there's a photo on that page, unless you realize I'm using a very old web convention of describing the image contents by placing said description inside of square brackets.
Secondly, there is no actual link to the picture on the converted entry.
Third, on most (all?) graphical browsers, just holding the mouse over the images will pop up the text above (I don't think many people know about this).
And fourth, the text is a reference to the movie “Airplane!” which does fit the subject of the picture on that page, which is of two traffic signs giving conflicting parking directions (this really doesn't have anything to do with the second-class status of the post on gopher—just more of an FYI type of thing).
I used Lynx because I didn't want to bother writing code to convert HTML to plain text—especially when I had access to a tool that can do it for me. It's just that it doesn't really do a great job because I expect the HTML to do the formatting for me. And I really do need to write a description of the photo in addition to the caption I include for each picture. Ideally, it would look something like:
Extreme contradiction, Brevard edition
So Bunny and I came across this lovely bit of signage in downtown
Brevard [1]:[Image of two traffic signs one above the other. The upper one says
“NO PARKING, LOADING ZONE” and the lower one saying “RESERVED PARKING
for the HANDICAPPED”—“The white zone is for immediate loading and
unloading of passengers only. There is no stopping in the red zone.” /
“The red zone is for immediate loading and unloading of passengers only.
There is no stopping in the white zone.” / “No, the white zone is for
loading of passengers and there is no stopping in a RED zone.” / “The
red zone has always been for loading and unloading of passengers. There's
never stopping in a white zone.” / “Don't you tell me which zone is for
loading, and which zone is for stopping!”] [2]So which is it? Loading, or parking? Or loading of wheelchairs for parking?
Or parking for wheelchairs to be loaded? I'm so confused!References
[1] https://www.cityofbrevard.com/
[2] gopher://gopher.conman.org/IPhlog:2019/06/13/Confusion.jpg
And then reality sets in and I'm just not up to writing an HTML-to-text translator right now.
Sigh.
Sorry, gopherspace.
