The people working on the major browsers aren't fools. If they were optimizing to get meaning across, they'd have done one hell of a better job than half-readable, non-accessible mess we have now that requires megabytes of divs and classes to markup, and a supercomputer to render.

Point being that the "empire" does not give a hoot about meaning. Their priorities lie elsewhere.

edit: Example. One day Steve Jobs just felt like flash didn't belong on his platform. At the time, flash was everywhere. Where is it now? I'm not shedding a tear for it--just using it as example of what a top-down enterprise the web actually is compared to what some people would like to think.

Do you mean Google? Whoever makes the CSS spec? Who or what exactly are you railing against, other than "shitty web design"?

Shitty web design is shitty web design. Google and Mozilla themselves didn't make the Smithsonian Magazine site a bloated monstrosity, nor can I think of a reasonable way for a browser to prevent sites from sucking without ruining the "non-geek" user experience on better-behaved dynamic sites and web apps.

Anything not supported by HTML or CSS directly will inevitably be implemented in Javascript. We've already been there.

I'm "railing" against the platform itself. I've had a web browser and a broadband connection since the late '90s.

Unwanted popups still happen. Cross-site-scripting attacks are still a thing. Canvas fingerprinting is still a thing, albeit a newer one. Sites I visit can still track me across other properties unless I jump through a number of hoops. Content creators are still largely not being compensated for their work. Half the sites I visit are practically unreadable for me, and my eyesight is pretty damn good.

The big companies like Google or Apple could have stopped a few of these races to the bottom in their tracks--just like Jobs did to Flash--but they haven't, for, umm, reasons...

https://web.archive.org/web/20170706120427/https://www.tedun...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=10fnZ2chEYg