Hence the idea of a separate markdown only browser. I don’t think http is the problem here. So it would be better to reuse as much existing tech as possible.
Note: Personally I don’t think it would catch on, the convenience of handling everything in one program is just too high.
I like to think about books as of an example where content is way more important than presentation. Most of the web sites these days spend a lot more effort on how you present it than what, in the end a 1000 thousand words article now has a very complex architecture behind it, hundreds or thousands of time more than the content.
For that matter you can serve images or whatever binary files as individual requests (that is, not inline with another repsonse).
I've been playing with it and I rather like it.
It's also the reason why it caught on. On one hand people reject the ability to express individuality on the web, on the other a similar crowd is nostalgic about geocities and praises similar revivals. It's either one or the other.
> I would really like to see structured text that is self-descriptive (e.g. this is the document title, this is a paragraph, this is a header, bullet list, etc.) but have no ability to influence HOW those things are displayed- eventually maybe we'll have browsers that can support rich theming, etc.
How about publishing markdown over HTTPS? Then make a client that renders just that?