I’ve tried Gemini, and honestly being that we are in the fine year of 2025 already, it actually feels like a regression from Gopher, to the point I’ve described it in other Gemini discussions as “taking Gopher and formatting it as a brutalist buttplug”. The fact that, unlike Gopher, or HTML, or whatever else, there is no way to iterate the protocol, only makes it even worse.
Personally if I had to do a “smaller web” thing I’d simply pick up on the work that someone else already has done that is proven to work. Archive of Our Own has a pretty decent document parser that takes only a “safe subset” of HTML and CSS that allows at least the historical styling inherited from the printing press, basic accessibility and machine readability elements like quoteblocks, cites, timestamps and inline diffs, and at least recognizes enough CSS to allow to describe naturaly occurring phenomena such as color, shape or size of text. So, enough for rather decent document styling.
Sure, it’s not 100% there but from what I’ve tested for my work, it’s about 10 years closer to a decent web semi-replacement than Gemini and Gopher will ever be.
It’s an older hyperdocument protocol, in some ways the predecessor of the web. You could have a Gopher client that would give you a listing and a search to access a number of resources,