Not many people realize what an advantage stupid ol' gopher
offers over the Word Wide Web.  The key word to its advantage is,
in fact, *stupid*.

Klutzy hierarchical menus offer a common user interface that allow
even the dimmest Net surfers to navigate with ease.  Other users,
such as those who are blind and depend on having the screen
automatically read to them, can simply skip items that are not of
interest instead of wading through the mounds of hypertext and
irrelevant links that are the hallmarks of the World Wide
Spaghetti Bowl(tm).  Veronica, as a search tool, surpasses almost
any search tool the Web could possibly provide (eg, how many
links, do you suppose, would file under "here?").

The Web is becoming increasingly commercialized.  One can't go
anywhere now without having to put up with someone's pitch.
Gopher, on the other hand, remains perhaps the last bastion of
true community knowledge and spirit.  Use the Web to put up some
meaningless posters and graphics for a quick buck; use gopher if
you want to get real work done that's of any lasting
significance.

Authoring in gopher is a piece of cake.  The HTML I have to learn
to emulate a gopher menu is mindlessly simple.  The end user must
certainly appreciate loading my flat text in a fraction of a
second as opposed to the fifty-megabyte mpeg file of my flapping
jaw (to be viewed with the accompanying audio file) giving
exactly the same information, but with an hour or so load time.
There are no fancy fonts.  There are no pretty pictures.  There
is no clogging the Net with useless bandwidth. Furthermore, my
account is only 1M big; I wouldn't have room for that mpeg
anyway.

Boring?  Perhaps... but stupid, *stupid*, **stupid** simple,
focused, crude, and easy.

          SWEEP OUT THE WEB!   FEED THE GOPHER!!