Rather than creating a new branch, I took another copy of pydoc.py, kept its name, and only applied the html-related changes in it. (no new  -c option, no unrelated PEP8 changes to the best of my knowledge.)  The original pydoc.py referred to pydoc_data/_pydoc.css (which was an empty file).  I put the "minimal new styling" option in that file.

I noticed that some former <a name=...> had no href attribute; I changed the "name" attribute to "id", since "name" is deprecated in html 5.  However, my styling option shows these as actual links whereas they are inactive.  An example of this can be seen in _codecs