I guess the philosophical point behind this is:
Do we want the syntaxes of the URls for different schemes
to use similar conventions, or do we want the URLs to be
use the delimiters of the actual protocol?
If we have fields separated by %09 for gopher and ";"
for FTP and ? for HTTP and "#" for news and whatever,
then I feel people will get them wrong more. I think
the requirements are that these things are "people friendly".
So if the URL spec itself adds things, then it should be
relatively consistent in what it does.
However, if the URL spec passes things on opaquely, then
obvioulsy the gain in cleanness is great and as little
mapping as possible should be done.
If the Gopher URL corresponds to excatly what is sent
down the wire, then why not define it has that and
have done, with a reference to the Gopher+ spec?
How about:
"The path part of the gopher URL consists of the command to
be sent to the Gopher server by the client to retrieve the
document, omitting the trailing CR LF, and encoding all
reserved charecters. The command may be a gopher [ref]
or gopher+[ref] command."
Tim BL