You've described a static site generator, which I mean not as "hey you should have known that" but more as a "good news, that basically exists and you can use i

You've described a static site generator, which I mean not as "hey you should have known that" but more as a "good news, that basically exists and you can use it now!" No, there's no standard with static site generator, but there never will be. The combination of the wide variety of needs and use cases and the ease of starting one of these up (I can literally bash together the skeleton of a useful static site generator in 4 hours, and this isn't just "oh I could recreate dropbox in a weekend if I wanted to because I am a swaggering HN programmer", it is something I've literally done rather than sit down and learn someone else's because it was faster to bash something together than read docs) means that there will never be a shortage of these, and none of them will ever managed to capture 99% of the market to become a de facto standard. I basically have websites that work the way the author describes. There's no particular need or benefit from expecting the web browsers to do this. There are disadvantages to this approach but the web browser directly rendering the markdown doesn't really solve any of them.