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commit 0a99072cd83f2c9b57d19cd496069c7dc7b2221b
Author: Solderpunk 
Date:   Sat Nov 23 19:46:04 2019 +0000

    Discuss drawbacks of Gopher's directory / text dichotomy.

diff --git a/docs/faq.txt b/docs/faq.txt

--- a/docs/faq.txt
+++ b/docs/faq.txt
@@ -186,7 +186,37 @@ connections are made to.
 The native content type of Gemini is strictly a document, with no
 facility for scripting.

-## 2.4 How can you say Gemini is simple if it uses TLS?
+## 2.4 Is Gopher's directory / text dichotomy really a shortcoming?
+
+Modern usage habits in the phlogosphere would seem to suggest that
+many people think it is.  An increasing number of users are serving
+content which is almost entirely text as item type 1, so that they can
+insert a relatively small number of "in line" links to other gopher
+content, providing some semblence of HTML's hyperlinking - a perfectly
+reasonable and inoffensive thing to want to do.  Without taking this
+approach, the best Gopher content authors can do is to paste a list of
+URLs at the bottom of their document, for their readers to manually
+copy and paste into their client.  This is not exactly a pleasant user
+experience.  But forcing hyperlinks into Gopher this way isn't just an
+abuse of the semantics of the Gopher protocol, it's also a
+surprisingly inefficient way to serve text, because every single line
+has to have an item type of i and a phony selector, hostname and path
+transmitted along with it to make a valid Gopher menu.  Any and all
+claims to simplicity and beauty which Gopher might have are destroyed
+by this.  Gemini takes the simple approach of letting people insert as
+many or as few links as they like into their text content, with
+extremely low overhead, but retains the one-link-per-line limitation
+of Gopher which results in clean, list-like organisation of content.
+It's hard to see this as anything other than an improvement.
+
+Of course, if you really like the Gopher way, nothing in Gemini stops
+you from duplicating it.  You can serve item type 0 content with a
+MIME type of text/plain, and you can write text/gemini documents where
+every single line is a link line, replicating the look and feel of a
+RFC1436-fearing Gopher menu without that pesky non-standard i item
+type.
+
+## 2.5 How can you say Gemini is simple if it uses TLS?

 Some people are upset that the TLS requirement means they need to use
 a TLS library to write Gemini code, whereas e.g. Gopher allows them

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