I often come up with ideas in the hazy half-dream state before I wake up. Recently I was thinking about exactly how shitty the web has become. And also about how much I love plain text formats like Markdown. So what about a Markdown Web?

The idea is harkening back to the dawn of the web, but instead of basic HTML, everything is Markdown. The rendering is client side (with some plugins for extensibility) and the user gets to decide how the whole web looks simply by choosing a theme for their browser. All script and style tags are stripped, no hosted ads, no tracking. Sites can still run sponsors and use affiliate links, but banner ads are gone.

I know that a lot of the web depends on ads to survive. There have been a lot of micropayment options, and I think something like that could work, replacing the ad-based model entirely. Everything is paywalled, but at very affordable rates. That would require a lot more central processing than I’ve brainstormed thus far, so I’m leaving it as an open question.

I’m envisioning this as running on the same servers the web currently exists on, not building some independent blockchain web or anything. Although I’m open to brainstorming on that.

I’m posting this mind map in the hopes that it will start a conversation. Let me know what projects you know already exist around this, what you think it would require, and what your own imagination for a better web looks like. Add a comment to this post to start a conversation on the forum.

Mind map courtesy of MindNode Next and my Jekyll SVG Viewer.

Just thinking out loud here. Let me know what you think.