On reflection of Cloudflare’s announcement of “Markdown for machines” in February, a feature that provides simple, clean Markdown versions of web pages to AI agents, unstory dryly observed:
You get HTML, trackers, cookie banners, popups, and JavaScript.
…
Machines get the clean version.
I enjoy this take. If there’s a “clean version”: something simpler, easier to read, lower-bandwidth… why aren’t we giving that to the humans in the first place!
Though I’ll tell you what: if this pattern becomes widespread, I’ll absolutely use (or implement!) a browser plugin that spoofs being an LLM, so that I can get the clean content, and then Markdown-to-HTML converts it back so my browser can display the “readable” version of the page.
And what a world that would be. Humans, pretending to be robots, that pretend to be humans! We live in interesting times.
“Though I’ll tell you what: if this pattern becomes widespread, I’ll absolutely use (or implement!) a browser plugin that spoofs being an LLM, so that I can get the clean content, and then Markdown-to-HTML converts it back so my browser can display the “readable” version of the page.”
When I shared the post on my blog, somebody commented the exact same thing. So I can see a version of that becoming a reality if enough people get behind it.
Now? I’ll just stick to RSS. :)
I saw that you’d mentioned it, too, but I hadn’t seen that comment. I’m clearly in good company!