Comment by WorldMaker

It's fascinating how much "email HTML" is trapped in about HTML ~2.5, with limited CSS support and still a ton of FONT tags and TABLE layouts.

HTML 2 might be an interesting subset of HTML to "focus on" for smolweb, but it would be a big retro throwback, and not feel at all modern.

If you were starting today, might be more interesting to start with the most modern stuff and work backwards. HTML 2 TABLE could be implemented as a specialization of CSS Grid, for instance.