If you want that, you can just fire up links/elinks/lynx; it, surprisingly, works fairly well even today.
But even the writer of the article didn't want to just see the text - she wants to see the shoes and decide which one to buy. You don't want to see a table with shoes numbers, descriptions and prices when you are shopping; visuals are important, too.
That's why noone is actually using text-only browsers.
Maybe a new content type would work... "text/html" would be the application and "text/static-html" would be "just the content"? Browsers would then just have a toggle option of some sort.
Also, what's wrong with HTML/CSS that is in any way resolved by XML/XSLT? I'm genuinely curious why somebody would put their content into a format with no default, well-understood display semantics.
and the client could use the default xslt if they were happy with that, and a custom otherwise.
This whole thing seems like a Macromedia redux of sorts. Web devs suddenly have a bunch of new tools to play with and some of them go nuts and do stupid things we'll all laugh about in 5-10 years. Of course in 5-10 years there will be something else for short-sighted marketers to abuse...
What happened to graceful degradation? Is it not agile enough to expect a server to be able to work at least minimally with any browser?
Online stores show so little of what they're actually selling - we wanted to try stripping out everything that isn't the products. (using shoes from Amazon as the example here)
That is presumptuous: Most users have zero choice in the matter.
I think you're confused and you aren't really keeping up with the conversation.