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Has there been any work at all done on staking out workable subsets of HTML? I looked around a fair amount a while ago and the closest thing I could find was AMP.

I think this is an important issue because the HTML spec is crazy long and it would be awesome for new technologies (say a new desktop GUI library or whatever) to be able to say "we allow and will interpret this subset some HTML" without committing to the entire byzantine spec.

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I don't think HTML itself is the problem, what sucks up all those CPU cycles is Javascript and CSS. So remove (almost) all of Javascript and big parts of CSS and we're good to go.

We need a name for this and since it's HTML5 with stuff removed we can call it HTML5--, so HTML4 ;)

JS and CSS are obviously super messy, but that's a whole different issue.

I'm thinking more of cases like letting people write some HTML in a local notetaking program or something like that -- what's a nice subset of tags you should give them so they can make text look good, but doesn't commit you to supporting the lovecraftian being that's the entire HTML spec?

Also your last line made me laugh. Nice delivery=)

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