I have been talking to a number of people in the area recently
who want to setup gopher or www information servers for their
users to access both local and external information. In most
cases their first intention is to go for Gopher, because it is
"simpler". When digging more the issue it appears that they just
tried both ASCII clients (gopher and www line-mode) and the
gopher ASCII client is much nicer being based on curses.
Thus, i think that the problem is not with SGML/HTML but simply
with LineMode.