A mews is the lane round the back where the stables used to be: narrow, quiet, and not on the way to anywhere. The web could do with one of those. Small sites, plain words, nothing watching you read.
This obviously isn't the first attempt to do so. The IndieWeb and small web crowd have made this case for way longer than I have. The usual answer is to go and build somewhere else, and the people doing it are right about the problem. Gemini has been at it since 2019, Spartan trimmed even the TLS out of it, and I keep capsules on all of them.
Where I disagree is that it takes a new protocol, which means a new client, a new server, and a page hardly anybody can open from a link you send them. We already had a Web standard that was cut back on purpose, and cut back properly: a published spec, a DTD, and a few hundred million handsets to test it against. XHTML Mobile Profile 1.2 is strict XML built from a fixed list of modules, with the desktop machinery left out of the build: no frames, no iframes, no image maps, and basic tables instead of the full set. It kept scripts and author stylesheets, because a phone in 2008 was expected to want them.
Mews goes further, for different reasons, and keeps the MP while it is at it. Out go the scripting, style and object modules and the event attributes; what is left is a choice rather than a hardware budget: headings, paragraphs, lists, links, a few images, one stylesheet that nobody gets to write, and nothing at all loaded from a server you don't control. The phones were the excuse. The quiet is the point.
Authors provide structure. Readers control presentation. Every rule in the spec follows from that one line, which in practice means I don't get to pick your typeface, your line width or your colours, and you don't have to put up with mine.
Here is a conforming Mews page, and not an excerpt either. The lot:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//WAPFORUM//DTD XHTML Mobile 1.2//EN"
"http://www.openmobilealliance.org/tech/DTD/xhtml-mobile12.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
<head>
<title>Signal Bars</title>
<meta name="mews-profile" content="0.1" />
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="mews-0.1.css" />
</head>
<body>
<h1>Signal Bars</h1>
<p>Notes on old phones and small screens.</p>
</body>
</html>
If that looks like 1999 to you, good.
There is exactly one stylesheet, and you don't write it. Copy mews-0.1.css onto your own site, link it, and then leave it alone. It sets a readable column width, a light theme and a dark one, and four palettes (warm, cool, green, and a monochrome one that looks like an early phone screen) which you choose between with a single class on the body. Every text colour in it clears 7:1 contrast against its background, which is a higher bar than most of the web bothers with.
Host your own copy rather than linking mine. If every Mews site pointed at one central file, that file's server would see a request for every page anybody reads anywhere, and the whole business of loading nothing from other sites would have been for nothing.
This is a draft, version 0.1, and I am still changing my mind about parts of it. The directory is new and nearly empty. But a page written to these rules opens on a handset from 2006, in your browser today, and in whatever is reading pages in twenty years, because there is almost nothing left in it to break.
So: write something. Link to a neighbour. Leave the light on.