Markdown is a convenient but deeply limited markup language with only a small subset of html's features. And yes, limitations are good because we want documents not web apps, etc, etc, but I mean "images can't have captions" limited, "navigation bars don't exist" limited. Actual important features of html don't exist in markdown, which is why almost every markdown platform ends up adding extensions and shortcodes. Why use markdown at all? Just use html.

"But html isn't style-agnostic" yes it is. CSS isn't style-agnostic. Instead of a markdown browser, how about a browser with a fixed stylesheet and no js? You don't even need a browser for that, that could just be a userscript that gets plugged into an existing browser. It'd break non-compliant websites that require javascript or custom css, but so would a markdown browser. Most people wouldn't write content for it, but most people wouldn't write content for a markdown browser either.

"But html is cluttered" it doesn't have to be. This is a valid webpage:

    
    Page Title
    
Page Title

    
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit.
    Ut ac lorem ut massa euismod vestibulum.

    
Nullam rutrum blandit eleifend. Aenean a varius diam.
    Morbi sodales velit nunc, vel vestibulum lorem tempus sodales.

Personally, I prefer writing in markdown, but that's no reason to insert a markdown renderer into browsers. HTML can already be as sleek and readable as you want. If we added a new type of markup for anybody with a personal preference, we'd never stop.

For a static document markup language, Djot does a rather good job: https://github.com/jgm/djot

It's very similar yet much fuller-featured than commonmark, with support for definition lists, footnotes, tables, several new kinds of inline formatting (insert, delete, highlight, superscript, subscript), math, smart punctuation, attributes that can be applied to any element, and generic containers for block-level, inline-level, and raw content. In addition, it resolves ambiguities in the commonmark spec and parses in linear time with no backtracking.

Further discussion lower in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33553293

Quickstart for Markdown users: https://github.com/jgm/djot/blob/main/doc/quickstart-for-mar...

Some more in-depth examples, showing how Djot would be rendered into HTML: https://htmlpreview.github.io/?https://github.com/jgm/djot/b...