It's like he reacted to overly complicated websites by going to another extreme of making a text document on gopher. Simple HTML on www would have made his point beautifully and been functional so that I didn't have to copy paste the URL.

Philip Greenspun's site has always been my golden standard of what you can do with minimal, hand-edited HTML. http://philip.greenspun.com/writing/

Is it, though? I find it extremely difficult to read paragraphs that are that wide.

You could always shrink your window.

Yea he had some very good points but that one made me chuckle.