[frezik]

> I remember the pipe and slash symbols 'spinning' while waiting for a large plain text document to complete downloading in the old days. So the "resource lite" argument doesn't fly completely.

There really isn't a significant difference between the two. They both operate over a single TCP channel. HTTP/1.1 has a slightly higher header size, but it's not even half a kilobyte.

The only real difference is that HTTP usually serves up rich HTML, which contains all sorts of graphics and JavaScript toys and other bandwidth-hogging transmissions. If we limited HTTP to using HTML 3.2, no JavaScript, and only the occasional 2kb gif, it'd be resource lite, too.

FYI--I wrote the Apache::GopherHandler Perl module for running a Gopher server under Apache2, which I now consider to be mostly a waste of time. (https://metacpan.org/pod/Apache::GopherHandler)