“The only thing missing here might be a few sensible lines of CSS to set better typography rules. Those could still be inlined in the head though, easily coming in under the 14KB limit for the first connection roundtrip.” — Max Böck
Why bother increasing the exemplar 1.2kb NPR text site to 14kb? I wonder if there’s room in the world for a better baseline stylesheet. We could move that burden to the browser and save 12.8kb times infinity plus not burden developers to learn or source design for basic content.
Perhaps there could be a new doctype that declares “I am the plainest of HTML and have no style whatsoever. Do with me what you will.” It could be a well-agreed-upon set of minimal enhancements to the present-day browser default styles, the modern equivalent of “links are all blue” and such. Alternately, it could take the form of multiple themes for the user to choose from as their preferred default viewing experience.
Maybe this is a pie-in-the-sky, grade-A terrible idea, but I think even minimum viable experiences should be better.