My idea is to use Markdown over HTTP(S). It's relatively easy to implement Markdown renderer, compared to HTML renderer. It's possible to browse that kind of website with HTML browser with very simple wrapper either on client or server side, so it's backwards compatible. It's rich enough for a lot of websites with actually useful content.

Now I know that Markdown generally can include HTML tags, so probably it should be somewhat restricted.

It could allow to implement second web in a compatible way with simple browsers.

You can just use HTML4 if you want, it's already supported and standardized. Markdown is very much not.

HTML4 + CSS (2?) + JavaScript is already huge platform, very much not trivial to implement. Like you can already do something like that with niche browsers like links, but it's obviously not working, so something else is needed...

Markdown doesn't do the latter two, so that's not comparable in the slightest.

I believe this is the way we might get out of this mess.

With a markdown over HTTP browser I could already almost browse Github through the READMEs and probably other websites.

Markdown is really a loved and now quite popular format. It is sad gemini created a separate closed format instead of just adopting it.

A few too many 9s there I think. You're estimating that only 1 person in every 10 million could care less. So less than 50 such people in the USA for example

Maybe you dont need a big enough % to change but a sufficient absolute number, which given internet size might happen with the right 0.00001%

Oh they would care if one shows them much snappier versions of services they use. They just don't know better.