Gemini mostly seems to be comparable to HTTP, since the markup/formatting part seems to be extremely minimal. For HTTP, if we narrow things down to HTTP/1.1 GE

Gemini mostly seems to be comparable to HTTP, since the markup/formatting part seems to be extremely minimal. For HTTP, if we narrow things down to HTTP/1.1 GET without keepalive (connection-reuse) and for fixed content-length documents only, then I don't think it's vastly more complicated than Gemini. A client are not required to implement to implement more if they don't need it. Browsers implement more (HTTP/[23], other request types, caching, etc) because it improves the user experience - but it wouldn't even be required for showing most web pages.