INLINE elements and GOPHER for the gopher-of-things

INLINE Gopher links and the Gopher of things!

INLINE links are a simple but powerful Gopher addition that I've implemented in my "Simple Gopher Client" program. This was a small change, but it makes a giant improvement when using the Gopher protocol to control devices as part of the "Gopher-of-things". Here's a screenshot:

The little array of buttons are all commands for a Skoobot device (left, right, etc.). It's all Unicode, which is why the "rover" mode is a little picture of a satellite. When I press a button on the client, the Gopher command goes to a simple 70-line custom gateway program that can both display a Gopher page for the Skoobot and also can control a Skoobot robot using Bluetooth.

A common IOT configuration is that you have some set of Bluetooth (or similar) sensors connected to a hub, and then you want to have a control program that can access the hub. Often you want to make a quick, simple prototype before you go to the trouble of making a full. If only there was some widely-used very simple protocol that could make a simple UI...

Hey wait! That perfectly described Gopher! And that's why my Best Calculator, IOT edition now supports Gopher-of-things: you can make a simple "gateway" program that controls your sensor and still make a nice little user interface!

But there's something missing. Gopher works page-by-page: when you click a link (a menu entry, in Gopher terms), you get an entire new menu back (or a file or an image). There's no proviso for simply updating some existing page.

That's where my INLINE extension comes in. When a link (directory entry type '1') is seen, if the fifth column includes the word INLINE, then the link is turned into a button! And when pressed the resulting Gopher menu (directory) is returned, the first element of the returned menu replaces the first non-button item.

You can see that in the image. When a press the STOP button, it sends a command to the gateway, which does the command, and sends back just a little Gopher menu (directory) with the results of the command ("stop").

Technical details of the INLINE

1. Links (Gopher menu entry type 1) can be set to be INLINE, at which point they are called BUTTONS
2. The INLINE style is added to column 5 (which is also where the Gopher-plus "+" is added).
3. The INLINE style is part of a list of styles (e.g., "BLUE;INLINE") where styles are split with a semicolon (;). Never put a space in (it's "BLUE;INLINE" not "BLUE; INLINE")
4. Multiple BUTTON items can be placed on the same line if the client wants to.
5. The first menu entry from a button result will replace the first non-button item in the original menu. This means that you can have a block of buttons followed by a single data element.