It's just NFS without the kernel hacks, and with fulltext searching wedged in. No two ways about it. But HTTP is nearly identical to Gopher. I think we need to seriously rethink relative addresses. Or unless it's a Gopher address, where the data format interpretation is hacked into the routine that opens the connection.
Clients have no way of knowing any better than to grab the data an barf it on the screen.
And they'd know better than to treat it as text. In the mean time, the benefits of rapid-prototyping outweigh the performance penalties. These try to do what's already been done in the Xaw and Motif toolkits, and they don't do it as well. All the rest is reusable. Tony did a heck of a job.