Naturally, they will still benefit enormously from the increased bandwidth offered by the next generation of networks. All three have the potential to handle multimedia data, although only Gopher has started to realise some of that potential. Gopher uses simple menus to enumerate the documents which may be fetched, whereas WWW implements true hypertext. Both Gopher and WWW are in the process of upgrading their protocol specifications to cope with new requirements. I believe that there is an opportunity here for RARE to provide some input to this process, through either or both of the Multimedia working group and the Information Systems working group.
User requirements study.
Selection of one of Gopher, WAIS or WWW for further work. WWW is attractive because it is already hypertext-based, and the WWW team thinking on new protocols contains relevant ideas. Issues of format conversion and transfer time are important here. Role of commercial authoring software and need for conversion tools. Identifying any further work required.