Completely agree about Gopher. I still love it, but it has some real pain points. Gemini, on the other hand, has links, preformatted blocks, headings, quotes,

Completely agree about Gopher. I still love it, but it has some real pain points. Gemini, on the other hand, has links, preformatted blocks, headings, quotes, lists, etc. as part of the content specification. By keeping most of the visual _formatting_ out of the hands of the author, the content can be rendered however the user/client wants to display (or hear!) it. It can be viewed raw in a terminal or it can be typographically beautiful. There are even some clever efforts to apply different styles to different sites. The other appeal is to be able to _author_ content very easily. The text/gemini formatting is so simple/conventional, you pretty much already know it without trying. But its simplicity also lowers the barrier to building tools around it for authoring, displaying, syntax highlighting, and so on. (Gopher is also pretty easy, but the menu format is an arcane artifact from The Old Days and annoying to write by hand. Content is "plain text" by convention, but there is absolutely _no_ specification about line wrapping, character encoding, etc. so it's not as simple as it looks either. The lack of links in content leads some folks to use menus as content - tooling helps, but...yuck.)