[cpdean]

You are correct, ereaders have supported viewing the web for years, but it has been a miserable experience since the beginning.

    * Inline links everywhere tempting you to click away to a new page, both fracturing your attention as well as being a multiple-second delay between pages
    * Images are everywhere, needing to be interpreted by the rendering engine of the ereader either with a simple monochromatic threshold to figure out what parts of the fully color image are black and white, or if you're lucky it has some way to re-process the image through dithering so that it's possible to see what it is
    * web layouts always wanting you to have a screen larger than an ereader can support, so you're stuck scrolling back and forth on a tiny screen that already has a miserable refresh rate of once or twice a second.
    * the web is an application platform now, the vast majority of its features just not fitting within what an ereader can support

You're all correct, you can easily implement what Gemini does if you make one website that is only text. In fact, you can probably do it better since you don't have to be constrained to gemtext, or constrained to its handful of weekend-project servers for hosting the site, all of which have their own issues.

But the thing that keeps drawing me back to is is that while you can easily implement Gemini with HTML and HTTP, it is impossible to implement HTML and HTTP in Gemini. The fact that you can't implement a webapp in Gemini means that if you're browsing pages in Gemini, you get a consistent experience and every site is clean and respectful of the experience (whether the author wanted to respect it or not, they have no choice).

Perhaps the real counter-argument to Gemini is not "why don't website authors just make their websites simpler?" but instead "why don't modern browsers run in 'reader mode' by default?".

[zamadatix]

Where did I say anything about websites or HTML? Since when can HTTP and HTML be implemented in Gemini? And even if it could how does that answer the question?

For all the explanation of what Gemini does and why HTML+HTTP in a browser don't this response does very little to actually answer the question: "Aren't e-readers perfectly able to display e.g. MD over HTTP on existing clients instead of gemtext over Gemini on a one off client?"