Web and XML Glossary

The Gopher Protocol is designed primarily to act as a distributed document delivery system. While documents (and services) reside on many Servers, Gopher Client software presents users with a hierarchy of items and directories much like a file system. In fact, the Gopher Interface is designed to resemble a file system since a file system is a good model for locating documents and services. The user sees what amounts to one big networked information system containing primarily document items, directory items, and search items (the latter allowing searches for documents across subsets of the information base). Since the WWW allows greater flexibility in the structure and presentation of distributed information, the usage of gopher services and the number of gopher servers is getting smaller.