It’s too bad that WML from WAP is not used anymore.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Markup_Language

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol

WML pages had mostly text and hyperlinks from what I remember and even though it supported images too I think most such basic pages would be readable even if you turned image loading off.

I spent so much time tuning the WAP site for the forum I worked for back in 2008.

I had some sort of Nokia running on whatever 2kbps networking was going then, and would shave absolutely anything I could to make the forums load slightly faster.

We could use markdown.

It's a crying shame that a browser can't fetch a plain vanilla goodstuff.md file and display it natively.

Ideally IMO this would be accept headers. You're asking for the same semantic content but a different format. I'm not sure if there's a nice way of specifying html but in a minimal sense (we do quality with images, perhaps linked), however these could mostly be text/plain or text/markdown (and it'd be nice if that was then formatted properly by the browser).

This often makes a really nice API if you can do other formats too - the main page of cnn could respond to rss accept headers and give me a feed for example.