in terms of semantics it is almost entirely dissimilar except that it's line-oriented. instead of having any of the content type fields or whatever which enforc

in terms of semantics it is almost entirely dissimilar except that it's line-oriented. instead of having any of the content type fields or whatever which enforce half of gopher's grammar, links are just "=> gemini://some.url/tunes.mp3", and when you hit that content it gives you a header with a mime type telling you it's an mp3. so now you don't need any of the structure of gopher and can treat literally everything but links as raw text, and clients can optionally format some agreed-upon subset of markdown, and otherwise, that subset of markdown is so readable without formatting that you don't even really need it. this means you can create a far simpler protocol semantically: requests are just the uri, responses are just a header of a two digit response code and the mime type, and the rest of the response is just the content as raw text. that's the entire protocol grammar.