Network Access to Multimedia Information

This attribute contains a short description of the item. It may also include a Gopher reference to a longer abstract, held in a separate Gopher node. ASK This attribute is used for the interactive query extension. The interactive query facility in Gopher+ is used to obtain information from a user before retrieving the contents of a node. The client fetches the ASK attribute, which contains a list of questions for the user. His or her responses to those questions are sent along with the selector to the server, which then returns the contents of the node. This facility could be used as a very simple way of querying a database, for instance. Using the interactive query facility to supply a password for access control purposes is not a good idea there are too many opportunities for masquerading. The University of Minnesota maintains a registry of Gopher+ attribute types. For the VIEWS attribute, the registry contains a list of permitted view types. Note that these view types have a similar function to the type identifier described in the preceding section. The general format of a Gopher+ view descriptor is: xxx/yyy zzz: where xxx is a general type-of-information advisory, yyy is what information format you need understand to interpret this information, zzz is a language advisory (coded using POSIX definitions), and nnn is the approximate size in bytes. Possible values for xxx include text, file, image, audio, video, terminal. (It now appears that the University of Minnesota Gopher Team accepts the need to be consistent in the use of type/encoding attributes with the MIME specification. The Gopher+ Type Registry may thus eventually disappear, together with the set of xxx/yyy values it currently contains.)