There is no need to aim for mass adoption. Make it a standard for whoever wants a simple html environment. It could be situated between gopher and the full html spec.

People use command line based browsers. A limited browser is usable, just not for full web apps.

To start it, offer a website that checks websites for their compliance. At the same time, let webmasters register their site so that you can offer a directory of available content.

If you want to monetize your project, offer a search engine with ads for all sites that passed the test.

The icing on the cake would be a proxy service that transcodes complex websites into the simple standard by analysing the site with a headless browser.

I'd backdoor it into a app framework. Don't have to call it native, just a framework for making apps that happens to have a way to serve them to a user over TCP.

Yep. This was one of the possible directions but it also has an initial startup problem. Right now only large app makers are making these types of frameworks because they don't make any money. (Facebook, Microsoft, Google, Twitter, Apple)

That's why you have to come up with a sick app as an excuse to develop/dogfood the framework first!

What level of capability did you get to? Is it just for consumption of document like things, or could it be used for applications too?

I didn't get super far, but far enough to see that an alternative to HTML/CSS was very fast and certainly viable. I also haven't been able to figure out if it's a cool software project or a business. My sense is that it's a cool tech but Netscape & Mozilla never had a strong macro-business when compared to Google or Microsoft.