You are asserting that the provider of the website should have complete control over the experience.

But not everyone agrees with you -- the readers want control, too, and it's their hardware, after all.

I always thought we had this backwards. We should abandon sending the UA altogether and design pages according to the standards. If a browser doesn't render then correctly, then tell the browser to fix their shit.

I realize that nowadays this isn't as simple as that, but if we had started along that path, things would be much better now.

IIUC, we _did_ start out that way. it was probably Microsoft that first started differentiating itself by adding non-standard features and functionality. EEE, ya know.

Unfortunately I don't have anywhere near the clout to be able to tell Microsoft to do that. And in the meantime, my users look at a broken site.

Then you should publish PDF's or JPEG's because the user agent has always had final say in how a page renders, your style hints are merely recommendations.