For a web application, unstyled HTML is almost certainly a mess even if it's perfectly semantic, but for a web page you absolutely don't need any CSS at all for it to be at the bare minimum readable on almost any device.
Sure it's mostly black text on white backgrounds with only minor typesetting differences between elements but as a means to present information it has worked since the mid 1400s...
Firefox's reader view is a realistic system that lets us consume html pages without their original CSS.
The more page authors use html 'properly', the more incentive there will be to improve systems like reader view.
Re:Write HTML Like It's 1999
by dvfjsdhgfv on Saturday June 08, 2019 @05:14PM
(#20135226)
> Unstyled html is so ugly
This comment made me realize how relative everything is. It seems it was yesterday, when you would open Mosaic and slowly discover completely different worlds, one after another, and you'd never think of complaining HTML was aesthetically unpleasant...
When an alternate display method comes out and wants my semantic html, I will add it to my QA workflow and make sure that it looks good instead of relying on some vague standard of semanticness from one of many bloggers.