Gopher Protocol
The Gopher protocol is an application-layer procotol that was developed in 1991 at the University of Minnesota^1. It preceded HTTP, and fell in popularity with the release of the Mosaic Browser in 1993^2, but is still used by enthusiasts, and has been growing in popularity since 2018^3
Navigation in Gopher is designed around a file-tree-like menu system, and like gemtext, it's syntax is simple and small in size. In 1993, the developers at University of Minnesota proposed a series of enhancements to the Gopher protocol, called Gopher+, that adds additional fields that can be used as metadata about transmitted files.^4 However, as this was just before Gopher's decline, it was never widely adopted by the community. There were about 40 servers that are serving Gopher+ content in 2023.^5