What is Gemini? It’s Gopher over TLS. What’s Gopher? When the Internet was a very literal connection between the large institutions (educational and governmental) that could afford computer systems, you navigated the network in a manor closer to FTP; that is, file directories. There was no navigator serving you content, you really were rummaging through other people’s folders.
Since a random list of files conveys little meaning, thus was born the README. People took to placing a README file in their public folders to explain what was there. And since nobody reads READMEs what the early Internet needed was a way to describe a directory listing and what the server was for because any user could stumble across a folder with no idea which institution it belonged to. And thus, Gopher was born
Gopher is a very, very simple text format intended to automate the browsing of README files in directories. I must stress the importance of this — Gopher is not a document format like HTML or Markdown. It was invented to provide a preamble and links to the actual, real documents. Gopher files were never meant to be the content itself. This is where Gemini is mistaken.
Gemini lacks the basic expressiveness to represent existing content free of formatting. This is not simpler, it’s simply worse for authors who want to represent their content with Gemini. We’d be literally better off creating a browser that renders #Markdown files — at least everybody already knows Markdown, tons of tooling exists and much content is already authored in MD. I don’t like Markdown but if we could have a Web without JavaScript and author-mandated styling I’d take it over Gemini
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