https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-08-27/shania-twain-intervie...
This HTML page is 360523 bytes of raw HTML. After it has gone through my Markdown parser, it is just 9915 bytes of plain text / Markdown, about a 97% reduction. Only 3% of the HTML is actual content.
The point of Accept Markdown is to save web hosts bandwidth. An AI harness can (and already does) download the HTML & parses out a Markdown version so that it is only minimal tokens before it hits the context window. But I still need to download the 360KB of HTML from the server in order to extract the 9KB I actually need. By serving Markdown versions of your page to AI agents, you can save 97% of the bandwidth that AI agents might be incurring.
There's no reason this page needs to be 360KB of HTML. A handcoded / handoptimized HTML file might be only 12KB - converting from Markdown to HTML is only going to minimal file increase. But that isn't what the web is. It's full of slop generated by CMS applications & Bootstrap & web frameworks and relics of Frontpage edited WYSIWYG HTML editors. Accept Markdown is trying to get webhosts to save everyone bandwidth by serving the Markdown from their side. Maybe it has a chance if it gets baked in at the web server level, or because Cloudflare is applying it to sites that flow through their network. But I think it's ultimately futile - the same people who don't know their Wordpress output is garbage, also won't know how to configure Markdown on their server.