Gopher was great. I remember telneting through university networks, exploring, and by chance finding fascinating stuff; more than I could ever read.
But I think the author misses the real killer feature of the web. The difference in hypertext models (external vs internal) is mentioned, but glossed over. Gopher was stuck with hierarchical indexes. It suffered from all of the limitations of hierarchy and had no way to acknowledge the relations between things. And documents in Gopher were dead ends. The web's ability to link from anywhere within any document to any other (and even locations within it) is a huge differentiator.
That was critical - instead of a limited hierarchy leading you down to a dead-end, you had an unlimited neverending web of related ideas. Imagine the C2 Wiki or Wikipedia in gopher format - all the same content but with no links. It wouldn't have anywhere near as much value.
The simplicity, cleanliness, and order of Gopher has beauty, but the much messier web has real-world value. The network effects of linking would naturally cause it to grow exponentially faster.
The organization of knowledge is an old problem. Trees and indices are very handy ways to locate books, er, files. There were three things that killed gopher: multimedia, licensing, and search.
Inline images really set a webpage apart from the typical wall of text common at the time. University of Minnesota's licensing scheme made the web more attractive.
But the killer app was the web search engine: first DEC's AltaVista and then Google. Before web search engines, finding info you wanted on from a website was terrible - unless the pages were modelled after the traditional trees and indices. Links were fun (remember webrings?) but not nearly as useful for finding information until Google figured out ranking pages by weighting links.
I totally agree with this. The web reflected the messy organization and connections of the real world in a way that let us discover and link content in profound ways. Great supporting example with C2 Wiki w/out its links. That would be horrific haha.
But I think the author misses the real killer feature of the web. The difference in hypertext models (external vs internal) is mentioned, but glossed over. Gopher was stuck with hierarchical indexes. It suffered from all of the limitations of hierarchy and had no way to acknowledge the relations between things. And documents in Gopher were dead ends. The web's ability to link from anywhere within any document to any other (and even locations within it) is a huge differentiator.
That was critical - instead of a limited hierarchy leading you down to a dead-end, you had an unlimited neverending web of related ideas. Imagine the C2 Wiki or Wikipedia in gopher format - all the same content but with no links. It wouldn't have anywhere near as much value.
The simplicity, cleanliness, and order of Gopher has beauty, but the much messier web has real-world value. The network effects of linking would naturally cause it to grow exponentially faster.