The web experience in developing regions remains subpar, primarily due to the growing complexity of modern webpages and insufficient optimization by content providers. Users in these regions typically rely on low-end devices and limited bandwidth, which results in a poor user experience as they download and parse webpages bloated with excessive third-party CSS and JavaScript (JS). To address these challenges, we introduce the Mobile Application Markup Language (MAML), a flat layout-based web specification language that reduces computational and data transmission demands, while replacing the excessive bloat from JS with a new scripting language centered on essential (and popular) web functionalities. Last but not least, MAML is backward compatible as it can be transpiled to minimal HTML/JavaScript/CSS and thus work with legacy browsers. We benchmark MAML in terms of page load times and sizes, using a translator which can automatically port any webpage to MAML. When compared to the popular Google AMP, across 100 testing webpages, MAML offers webpage speedups by tens of seconds under challenging network conditions thanks to its significant size reductions. Next, we run a competition involving 25 university students porting 50 of the above webpages to MAML using a web-based editor we developed. This experiment verifies that, with little developer effort, MAML is quite effective in maintaining the visual and functional correctness of the originating webpages.

翻译：发展中地区的网络体验仍然不尽如人意，这主要源于现代网页日益增长的复杂性以及内容提供商优化不足。这些地区的用户通常依赖低端设备和有限带宽，导致他们在下载和解析充斥着过多第三方CSS与JavaScript（JS）的臃肿网页时，用户体验较差。为应对这些挑战，我们提出了移动应用标记语言（MAML），这是一种基于扁平化布局的网页规范语言，能够降低计算与数据传输需求，同时以围绕核心（且常用）网页功能设计的新型脚本语言取代JS带来的过度膨胀。最后同样重要的是，MAML具备向后兼容性，可被转译为最简化的HTML/JavaScript/CSS，从而兼容传统浏览器。我们通过一个能自动将任意网页移植至MAML的转换器，在页面加载时间与大小方面对MAML进行了基准测试。在与流行的Google AMP对比的100个测试网页中，得益于显著的文件体积缩减，MAML在挑战性网络条件下可实现数十秒的网页加速。随后，我们组织了一场竞赛，邀请25名大学生使用我们开发的基于网页的编辑器，将上述50个网页移植至MAML。该实验证实，在开发者投入较少精力的情况下，MAML能有效保持原始网页的视觉与功能正确性。