>>57
K I will.
>>58
Gopher as well as HTTP supports MIME, and use it to support other datasets. The client only need to call the file in gopher, and read the MIME of what it will do to interpret the file. HTTP does the same, with more Markup and verbosity than needed in the headers. MIME is fine on its own.
You are blaming client programs for their stupidity, not the gopher protocol. Where have you seen UTF-8 characters/bytes in HTTP/1.1? I sure would like to see some. I do not see it in the standard:
http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616