[Publius_Enigma]

I too am nostalgic for a simpler web, and also an increasingly of the view that the modern web was a severe wrong turn for software engineering and computing generally. I also run my own gopherd and httpd servers. Despite the severe shortcomings of Gopher as a protocol in 2023, I simply cannot understand much of the design rationale behind Gemini.

Markdown is not a well-defined standard and is arguably no easier to parse than basic HTML 1.0. HTML can easily be rendered as text in a style not dissimilar to raw markdown if required.

The decision to enforce the use of TLS means that rolling your own client is less trivial than had it been optional. It also cuts out a big chunk of the hobbyist market who are most likely to be interested in a small, lightweight protocol. Support for Gemini will therefore be limited to systems with maintained TLS libraries. At the end of the day, anyone sniffing your Gemini traffic is going to be able to see the host you’re accessing - whilst TLS will preventable them knowing which specific page you’re reading, they will be aware of the set of pages you could be reading.

Instead, I am focussing my attention on building small, light web-pages that have completely optional CSS, are pure HTML without cookies or JavaScript and work in browsers modern or ancient. There’s a plethora of great browsers that can access it, from Lynx and Netscape running on a Solaris 8 machine to Chrome on my work PC. Servers are ample and well-tested.

And a good chunk of my website is text (rendered in Groff) to boot.

It’s 95% of the Gemini experience with 5% of the effort and 1000% more reach.