alt Hacker NewsThere was a golden age where lots of websites had WAP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_Application_Protocol) versions available while also running their "normal website", and the WAP version was always like 1/100 of the size of the normal website. Still, "normal websites" were minimal compared to now, but when you were on modem, even those websites loaded slow. For some time, most of my browsing were via the WAP versions of the websites I visited during the bi-daily hour of allowed internet access.
Maybe now we'll get something similar, just happens to be for LLMs, but for us who like less bloat, it can be a better viewing/reading alternative. Hope it spreads :)
There was also AMP (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accelerated_Mobile_Pages), where Google gave a huge reputation boost to your pages provided you served them under a different URL that Google could discover, and you massively stripped down the HTML and CSS to Google's limited subset.
It's effectively dead today, and while it was dominant, Google abused it to get people to view and link to their cached copies of AMP pages, rather than the original site.
It also led to widespread abuse where the AMP version of the page differed in content significantly from the regular page. The same issue existed for WAP.
You may also remember browsing the web using Opera Mini, which wasn't a direct user-agent but used Opera's backend systems as a proxy that stripped, minified and compressed HTML/CSS, and resized and recompressed images. It let you browse the web using massively less mobile data, but raised a lot of privacy and security issues.