> I think what the author wants is something like Gemini instead of HTML, but that has its own set of problems.

Yes and no. I want it to be simpler than HTML (which implies less features) but easy to parse. The problem with Markdown and other "text-like" formats is that they are designed to be written by humans (which is good) but complicates the parsing. I guess is more similar to the device independent format used by groff/troff before layouting.

>My plea for Dillo would be to instead just support a text/markdown mime-type natively and we can try for adoption in more browsers.

Dillo only supports a subset of HTML. Other formats like markdown are converted to HTML with plugins or read as plain text.