Meshtastic

In the radio settings page of the Meshtastic docs they describe the maximum speed of transfer for different setting combinations that have been tested. The fastest setting is the Short Range / Turbo, which can achieve up to 21.88 kbps: https://meshtastic.org/docs/overview/radio-settings/

The more common "LongFast" setting achieves 1.07 kbps. I just saved a few simple text-only HTML sites and they weight about ~2 - 5 kb, so it would certainly be possible to transmit them in a few seconds. There is some additional overhead with every packet, and in the EU at least we have a 10% duty cycle rule a 868 MHz, so only 6 seconds of every minute should be used for transmitting. Navigating through the page would be a bit cumbersome.

Since the html page will exceed the character limit from the Meshtastic app chat, it would probably make sense to make use of a dedicated app to send these kind of packets using LoRa instead of Meshtastic itself.

There are other methods of sending IP/TCP packets over packet radio. I am just now learning about this, and found this video yesterday: https://youtu.be/V0FAzMIsxMg?t=1413

With this technique you can use a radio to transmit packets to a Linux PC that behave just like an 'Ethernet' TCP packet. The video covers a related open source implementation called 'New Packet Radio' with which you can transfer 50 kbps - 500 kbps using radio packets in the 430 MHz band. These protocols work with frequencies and powers generally reserved for those with a HAM radio license: https://hackaday.io/project/164092-npr-new-packet-radio

And how much JS does that HTML load in?

Radio spectrum, especially license-free or amateur licensed, is really very limited compared to any kind of wired broadband or the 10s-100s of MHZ of dedicated spectrum controlled by cellular carriers. When you add low-power half-duplex nodes and multihop routing, yeah you are going to be limited to single digit Kbps.

You would probably get better performance with gopher.

When I first got online in the late 80s, it was at 300bps and, simplex i think.

There will always be something magical about watching text appear more or less letter by letter, and stream on to the screen. It also served as a constant ‘progress bar’ in so much as you knew your connection was live as long as text kept appearing.

Anyway, the reason I mention it that is that HTML pages in browsers, might need to be fully received before they will render ? Meaning there’d potentially be a lot of nothing until it’s ready to display.

Probably better would be to semi-reinvent the WWW, using markdown and some kind of special link syntax, and then have that run over the mesh with some kind of shared cache of already-transferred objects.

I think HTML is going to invite some unavoidable bloat at this stage in its evolution and the traditions that have grown around it, but you can do “the web”, conceptually, without HTML, and it sounds like a really good idea to me.

A pure HTML page tends to be quite small, I would think that is possible.