Having been involved in the VERY LONG conversation re: markup for gemini I can say there were a lot of considerations. There was definitely talk about whether a

Having been involved in the VERY LONG conversation re: markup for gemini I can say there were a lot of considerations. There was definitely talk about whether a format fit into the protocol at all. The text/gemini format was landed on as a simple way to have baseline text linkages that all clients would recognize. It has the added benefit of being simple to write, simple to read, simple to parse. Because servers send mime-types in their response there is literally nothing stopping a client from implementing a full html rendering engine, a markdown rendering system etc. for when they receive documents of those types.