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- TTC Gopher Custom Control - The Gopher
- protocol is designed to act as a distributed
- document delivery system. While documents
- (and services) reside on many servers across
- the Internet, Gopher clients present to the
- user a hierarchy of items and directories
- that resemble a file system. The
- hierarchical arrangement of information is
- familiar to many users. Hierarchical
- directories containing items (such as
- documents, servers, and subdirectories) are
- widely used in electronic bulletin boards
- and other information systems. By applying a
- type attribute to items in the hierarchical
- pseudo-file system, it is possible to
- accommodate complex documents in addition to
- the simple text documents. Complex database
- services can be handled as a separate type
- of item. For instance, you can retrieve
- graphic images into a file for viewing
- locally, view entire text documents, or
- search for information in a database all
- using the same client software. An extension
- to Gopher is the World Wide Web. If you have
- ever browsed around the Web you found
- numerous graphical images embedded into text
- documents. Gopher is the underlying method
- of information transfer and display for the
- user but, as we have discussed, Gopher is
- text based while the WWW is graphically
- represented.
-