[Lynx-dev] Gopher support for the "+" item type

[James Tomasino]

Hello Lynx developers,

First of all, thank you for your continued support of the gopher
protocol. Your browser helps keep the small but active gopher community
alive.

I recently discovered that Lynx does not have support for one of the
gopher item types defined in RFC 1436
(https://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1436). The + item type is defined as:

  The information applies to a duplicated server.  The information
  contained within is a duplicate of the primary server.  The primary
  server is defined as the last DirEntity that is has a non-plus "Type"
  field.  The client should use the transaction as defined by the
  primary server Type field.

Basically, it is a mirror of whatever the last type listing was. In
visual terms it can be hidden and used as a fall-back when trying to
access an item which fails to load. In gophermap terms, it could look
like: (\t used to represent tab characters)

1Tomasino's Gopher Hole\t/users/tomasino\tsdf.org\t70
+Tomasino's Gopher Hole Mirror\t/~tomasino\ttilde.town\t70

If my primary link is unresolvable, the system can fall back on the
alternate mirror.

If you want to see it in action, the gopher client named "gopher" has
support you can try out. Lynx reports "+" items as an unknown type.

Thanks again for your continued gopher support,

James Tomasino
gopher://sdf.org/1/users/tomasino