Re:A look at the Gemini protocol: a brutally simple alternat...
by clairity on Saturday July 04, 2020 @12:33PM
(#23733342)
as an extension of this, user stylesheets are interesting conceptually, but practically, web pages became quickly indistinguishable when the same stylesheet was applied to every page. it hindered memory (mental categorization) and recall.
users then predictably wanted pages to look different, to have style, and that's likely the principal cause of user stylesheets' decline, not corporate coercion. that's not to argue against user stylesheets per se, but that they'll likely never have wide usage.
Worth noting that this is modern browsers/web, and was initially not like this.
The term "user-agent" comes from that the _user_ has control over the experience, no matter what the publisher thinks. The agent (browser) acts for the user, hence user-agent.
User-agent CSS files were rampant back in the days, when a lot of content was unstyled. So you could navigate between websites and they looked the same, as they would use your user agent css files.
But then everyone decided they had to have a unique look on the web (CSS). Then they decided they needed unique functionality on the web (JavaScript). And here we are :)