I've been arguing that HTML would've been a much better information-carrier if "basic browser styling" did this. I'm quite certain that a large part of the web would need no CSS or just a few lines of it, if the basic (browser applied styles) were good. As in: designed by (information) designers. They could even differ per browser, as long as all of them were good (or really good).

But alas, base styles are a mess (yet still there!). They do have some hierarchy but accessibility and readability are bad. That's aside from aesthetics: just stuff like alignment, spacing, fonts, flow: very poor.

I am aware that more base styles would make that cursed "reset.css" even larger, but I guess if a large part wouldn't even need that, it would be fine. It would be a situation where everyone can choose "good styles" or "spend lots of effort to get even better, custom, styling", rather than everyone "spend lots of effort to get an even decent styling".

Honestly - it'd be pretty nice to be able to opt-in/out of the default user agent styles applied by browsers. If we really want to preserve compatibility - opt-in to a version.

Keep it all the same as current if there's no tag on the page, but if you add something like <meta uastyles="1.0.0"> or something, apply an improved set of default styles.

Get rid of the need for resets with <meta uastyles="none">

Basically - I'd love a way to allow browser vendors to dramatically improve the defaults without breaking everything, and also giving frameworks an easy opt out.

I agree that defaults are not perfect, but I'd like to add that the initial idea was that they are, well, defaults, and you -- as a user -- are supposed to adjust them to what you prefer. In some dashboard usually called "preferences" or "settings". And fact is that you still can: you can tell your browser "for this script, for serif, use this font family, for sans use that one" etc etc. You can set you preferred text colours. You can even write your own style that will sit between user agent styles (those "ugly defaults") and author styles (those forcing weird stuff). Initial idea was that our browsers will be truly individual tools and one of their main task will be consolidating those preferences from various sources. That's the "cascade" in the CSS.

Yes, I know. Back in the fun days when a browser was supposed to be my "user" agent. Before they became the mini-os they are today.

There's nothing here that would stop you from still doing that.

But if we're talking about practicality... I think far more people would get a benefit from improved defaults (as long as they're not breaking existing sites).

While I've modified the user styles for my chrome profile as a part of being a web developer, I'm not aware of a single non-developer acquaintance who has (literally - none). Honestly, not even many of the devs I've worked with have done it.

It's just not all that relevant when the defaults are so bad that all the sites are overriding them anyways. Makes it very hard to apply a set of user styles that's sane, so no one does.

Make the defaults better, and maybe you can end up back there.

I want to hug this whole thread. Yes, 1. browsers should improve their defaults. 2. web sites should respect user preferences over their own style, if the preferences are set. 3. browsers should make user preferences more prominent and provide an easier way to override web sites that refuse to honor them.

My browsing experience should not be determined by an artist or product designer 1000 miles away from me in an office somewhere.

Well put.

My language skills and time pressure fails me here, just wanted to express general "thanks folks" for your reactions as well. Seeing that someone shares similar point of view on this topic made me surprisingly very happy, so thank you again.

If they can't be bothered to change the settings, it means they don't care. Why would you force salvation on them?

In most browsers this basic style is user configurable, but 99.9% never bother.

I never saw a program that has good default settings. How people can use them like that?

Reminds me of http://motherfuckingwebsite.com and http://bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com

But the key, underlying point to ALL this stuff is that you do NOT NEED TO WORRY ABOUT PRESENTATION until you have the CONTENT.

A huge temptation is to spend hours and hours tweaking the presentation as a way of avoiding actually creating the content; this is the real danger.

Clicking on the first website, I can't even view it because it's asking for captcha.

So, to extend your comment: you do not need to worry about content if your website isn't even reachable. A GET request should never result in the client being bombarded with captchas. Unless you have a sure fire way to determine if said client is a human or an evil AI taking over the world (nobody does), just serve the damn page.

> Clicking on the first website, I can't even view it because it's asking for captcha.

It's definitely not, there is something else doing that to you. But it's not this website.

It's using some form of DDOS protection, not Cloudflare, but something. Access it via tor to see an example.

Wow, thanks for those links! No joke; the CSS on the better site is literally going to become my default CSS from now on.

It's a great example of how a little can do a lot.

The balance between design & function can be at odds when the mission of the page is not clear.

For consumption, these are awesome, your brain almost relaxes as it's easier than the usual onslaught.

It's also a great example of how even such a little can go wrong.

The CSS of the second website is wrong, as it uses 'color' without setting 'background-color'. Assuming anything about the default background color is not possible because it is user-configurable in most browsers.

At least http://motherfuckingwebsite.com remains readable when you change your color settings (the second one is completely unreadable on my browser).

You want https://thebestmotherfucking.website

It’s ok, but it’s already a bit too much. :)

Good point. If the background color changes that often, I'm assuming there's probably a good test out there for that and more.

The text was readable as designed on a white-background. CSS that considers accessibility or print friendly is always good to add.

> I'm assuming there's probably a good test out there for that and more.

Javascript test?

Yeah there's lots of a Javascript or css or html validators out there, and likely geared towards checking against a set of best practices.

If it was a javascript that checked for the elements you want to ensure is there that would be neat too, I just wouldn't want it to be just me :)

If you want a bit more, but not the frameworks with thousands of unused classes, this might be helpful: https://www.cssbed.com/

> If you want a bit more, but not the frameworks with thousands of unused classes,

I can't speak for other frameworks but tailwind only compiles the classes you actually use at build.

<style type="text/css"> ? what are we dinosaurs? You might as well leave out the closing <p> tags if you are going to be like that.

If the whole point of your website is to brag about code to accomplish reasonable formatting.... can we at least have code formatting? I think I have enough bandwidth to afford some line breaks.

Client side GA????

personally I miss the vanilla html of the late 90s (unless advanced guis)

same went for emacs I stopped using themes

Yeah, I actually like the oldest of the three best. The one with 7 css declarations was annoying to me somehow and the third option was garbage. I miss websites that were about conveying information.

It's a social dynamic thing. Whenever there's too many people it becomes a mess with scams, business, fads, over-engineering, regulations...

Mailing lists are still good for that I guess.

The default Emacs theme is not great, but the current best practice is to stop messing with themes and just use modus (vivendi or operandi depending on your light/dark preference), especially since they are now included as part of Emacs.

what's missing from vanilla ? honest question

There's nothing missing per se, but the contrast is not always good, and the highlight face is distracting.

> current best practice is to stop messing with themes and just use modus

Bold statement. Those look mostly terrible to me.

If you can't make it good, you make it pretty.

> 7 fucking declarations. That's how much CSS it took to turn that grotesque pile of shit into this easy-to-read masterpiece.

Such drastic difference with basic adjustments, damn

Too oversimplified ... no images (with captions), no other media (video, audio), no tables or grids, etc.

almost gasp like a book.

I have quite a few books with a pretty cover, pictures, charts, pullquotes, etc.

LaTeX predates HTML by a decade and supports pictures, charts, quotes and far more, and doesn't force me as an author to make finicky decisions about presentation. I just write the content, and then set the document class to whatever the publisher wants.

Who reads books with no tables, graphs, images, or maps? ;)

My immediate thought was The Machinist's Handbook or a similar publication for chemistry that is pretty much all tables.

Have you any idea how much work goes into typesetting a book?

Presented 'like a book'. Its a blog, not a 400 page novel.

I honestly prefer the original version without css. Plain browser styles have a kind of raw beauty that it's very hard to surpass.

In my mind "raw browser" look corresponds with "almost insane details coming" as the only sites still using that are often run by people who are WAY more concerned with the content they want to talk about than with the presentation.

Um, shouldn't all people be WAY more concerned with the content than the presentation? I don't want to read stream of consciousness with occasional lack of spaces and random case, but I'd really prefer to only read websites by people who give zero effs to presentation, and I had prior to this moment assumed everyone agreed, but that it was fun to do presentation, so people did. There are people who care about the presentation of what they are reading on even close to the same level of the content itself?!

You would be astounded how many people care about the form and not the function. They live among us. They vote.

If you care about your content, you should care about readability and navigability.

Good thing you can just block styles and get exactly the style you prefer.

You and me both. Perhaps we're relics of a bygone age where tech people cared more for function than form.

I would agree, with the exception of the text lines being too long.

I flipped over into reader mode and it's much improved, solely because of line length and dark mode.

Yes, the only reasonable css I'd concede is a max width in ch. But this should really be a browser standard to begin with.

Totally agree. For me, the original is far easier to read than the "better" or "best" versions.

Initiate rant mode:

- The gray on gray is like a joke, except it's not. I get the theory and alleged benefits. I get that some do prefer it, especially for IDEs. I get that some are happy to see (or at least apply) it all over the web. It just does not seem to apply here. Man alive. Literally making it harder to differentiate the text.

- I don't mind adjusting the browser width to get the lines exactly the right length for my screen and reading preference. Actually, I far prefer it over all the other options. This is like a tragedy-of-the-commons or lowest-common-denominator or dumbing-down-on-the-false-premise-of-being-smart issue. Instead of utilizing what we have, and encouraging people to learn and become capable with the simple and flexible tools, it's one size fits all. Only it doesn't.

End of rant. Sheesh.

The older version is very difficult to read.

That gray text is very bad for legibility, and so is the line spacing. 1.2 tops, and stick to black on white or very very light gray.

I was happy to see someone finally referred to the motherfucking websites.

On the other hand, I was disappointed to see the unique one of those I think it is worth to follow the advice [1] was not cited.

For curiosity reasons, I found out about [1] on a well-known website [2] that definitely puts content in front of presentation, even though I like their website's design.

[1]: https://bestmotherfucking.website/

[2]: https://suckless.org/sucks/web/

Heh I knew there were many but I couldn't remember them all, and the search terms around these are, shall we say, a bit dangerous.

Of all of them, I think the one you linked is probably the best. It is still interesting to watch the progression.

I know whitespace is "wasted" file size for transport purposes, but god damn that HTML on Better and Best are unreadable without proper indentations.

The source is on GitHub, you're basically looking at "machine code" for the browser. But if you want to verify it's the same code, it isn't obfuscated, so just run a beautifier over it and compare. Best of both worlds.

Not that I disagree per se, but if your job is to dress up CONTENT provided by others as a website or web app, there can also be the reverse problem:

An UI made of disintegrated, inconsistent and half-assed tries at writing CSS/JS. Not a rare problem in my experience.

Also happens to me when trying to write a "tiny web app for fun" where the CONTENT is interactive and created by myself.

prose.sh hits a sweet spot for me. Not just in the minimal-but-rich-enough presentation of blog posts[0], but also (off-topic for this thread I guess) the simple interface: just scp your markdown to prose.sh.

[0] example post from my blog https://mvexel.prose.sh/20230227-keeping-osm-database-uptoda...

The second one is absolute shit on my 27" 5k display though. The first one is not.

Could you elaborate? The first one is uncomfortable to me if you have a large browser window, because the lines of text are so long and it’s hard to follow. The second one at least fixes that problem.

Point being you can resize the window to where it’s comfortable rather than have a narrow column forced upon you.

Oh, well I like to have multiple tabs open, so that doesn’t work for me.

I’d never seen thebestmotherfucking.website! I appreciate the nuance it adds. I don’t have any nuance of my own to add right now but I do have to share my amusement at the empty list item under contributors. I figured there would be something in the source referencing someone (similar to how some folks on Twitter make special acknowledgments for people not on Twitter), but if this was that it’s a very Inside Baseball reference:

  <li><a href=""></a>
  </li>

Or it could be a joke about copypasta in hand-authored HTML. Or just actual copypasta. Who knows! But I enjoyed it.

You make it sound like an unequivocal truth; it isn't really so. I launched my own hobby website/blog only after I designed my content presentation. It helped me understand what I was writing. Of course I had the underlying drive to write something already, and was not coding up some CSS without a vision.

Everybody finds their writing juices differently. Push where it means you'll write more.

oy, that last link made my eyes strain. astigmatism ftw!

I think the main point is that, balance is also a very important design decision. A bit of CSS can go a long way; a lot of CSS can become a nuisance. There is definitely some 80/20 sweet spot where you get most of the design you need from a little CSS; finding that sweet spot is the challenge.

Javascript transitions/animations, on the other hand... yeah. I won't got there.

I agree, I get the idea that a blog doesn't have to be fancy, but a simple css theme with nice spacing and good font size goes a long way. The examples they show makes me click away instantly, because it is so damn hard to read.

In his examples the content is so niche the reader is probably willing to put up with no design to get the information.

Also possible the typeface is compatible with the readers and the content they regularly consume.

Hell, that typeface is something anyone is subjected too if you do anything long enough.

The experience of getting to imagine how much thought goes into laying out text on a typewriter is something I think should be for everyone to try at least a few times.

As a good example, his site is very readable (because of the limited width of lines), and the sites he linked to that were largely unstyled were very useful, but not very readable. It would be worth it to me, as a user, to use a browser plugin to add a few lines of CSS to those sites before I dove in.

The "Stylus" extension does what you need. Turn on "100 bytes of CSS" or a classless stylesheet when you need it.

If you want different window width, browser is usually resizable.

I don't want a different window width, I want a different line width.

And as mentioned, I achieve it myself with a style extension.

A lot of these things were handled by one typeface on a typewriter so the premise isn't entirely unfounded.

Visual communication and design predates CSS. Information architecture, design, guiding the user through the message is definitely a skill.

CSS can do as much distraction as it can enhancement. It's one appeal of Tailwind, it's more than serviceable while learning about the design, hierarchy, and flow.

> Good information design, clear visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. all help with communication

Isn't that what HTML gives us?

Well, that was what HTML was on track to give us. But once JS and CSS were introduced, semantic HTML that was actually semantic stopped developing, under the assumption that if someone needed, for example, a tab area or slide show, they could develop those themselves with CSS/JS. What we've gotten instead is extremely vague elements like "section" that don't communicate what the elements are.

If HTML were truly semantic, browsers could implement accessibility features around it, but because they're so vague, there's no real way for browsers to do that, which offloads the responsibility onto web developers, who in most cases aren't granted budget to do it. There are a handful of features such as alt properties, but these are pretty limited.

So yeah, HTML should give us that, but that's part of what users gave up when we decided it was acceptable to allow random websites to run code on our machines and tell us how our content should be displayed.

I agree with you, but also I think the section tag is one of the biggest leaps forward we've had. Putting an id on a whole section instead of a name= crap for references, and actually using nesting for hierarchy.

All the HTML5 input types are also an example of semantics impriving. It could be way better, but it's not a total stalemate

> I agree with you, but also I think the section tag is one of the biggest leaps forward we've had. Putting an id on a whole section instead of a name= crap for references, and actually using nesting for hierarchy.

How does this differ from how <div> was being used before?

I've switched to using <section> simply because it's a better name, but I'm not sure it's made any meaningful difference in my code.

> All the HTML5 input types are also an example of semantics impriving. It could be way better, but it's not a total stalemate

That's true, but I think we'd be moving forward a lot more quickly if we weren't devoting most of standards development resources toward giving companies more fine-grained control of our browsers through CSS/JS.

My e-book reader shows <em> text with teal color and I like it, it's better visible than italic and the font remains upright and readable, I doubt it will be comfortable to read lots of text in italic. I didn't notice any discrepancy with <i>. But for some reason <strong> doesn't override <em> and they multiply, though I saw it used once when an exclamation was repeated several times with increasing emphasis for extra dramatism.

This...does not match history.

There was never a golden era like you describe (it was a time of conflicting philosophies, people saying "eh, let's add this, that would be sweet", and browser vendors competing to add as much as possible to out "innovate" each other and the limited specs), semantic HTML helps in some cases but is never going to give you automatic accessibility, and a one size fits all browser style is still not going to give you what you need even as you add increasingly unsemantic tags to try to improve it (which is exactly what was happening pre-CSS).

> This...does not match history.

I've been writing web code since 1995ish, so...

> There was never a golden era like you describe (it was a time of conflicting philosophies, people saying "eh, let's add this, that would be sweet", and browser vendors competing to add as much as possible to out "innovate" each other and the limited specs)

I did not describe a golden era of HTML, because a golden era of HTML was precluded by the introduction of JS/CSS. Had JS and CSS never been invented, we might have achieved a golden era of HTML, but we would have needed web standards to mature before that could happen. What happened was, web standards did mature, but they matured to serve websites rather than users. As a result, mature web standards center around JS and CSS, leaving HTML anemic and weak.

What we have now is a time of conflicting philosophies, with websites competing to add as much as possible to out "innovate" each other. Users still suffer the same inconsistent interfaces they did in 1997, it's just that instead of browsers being inconsistent, it's websites that are inconsistent.

Well, there was a previous garbage area, when HTML was, rather than being semantic, laid out using tables and \<color\> and \<font\>. I remember telling people to not do that, especially when the first version of CSS came out, and you could make websites look nice with semantic HTML that also worked in Lynx.

Table layouts are still superior to CSS in that they achieve the Holy Grail layout. As far as I'm aware, CSS still fails to achieve the Holy Grail within any reasonable realm of effort.

Hell, the entire reason the internet moved from Holy Grail layouts to singular sidebar and vertically integrated layouts was because CSS can't into Holy Grail.

With how wide most users' monitors are ever since 16:9 became commonplace, Holy Grail should be the ideal content presentation layout because it uses all that free space on the sides for non-content (eg: navigation) so precious vertical real estate can be dedicated to content.

This doesn't add up. CSS grid, flex box, etc all do the "holy grail" layout with a couple lines. The tables mess that was early www was and remains an absolute mess of markdown to maintain for layout. Semantics and accessibility are practically out the window with table.

HCI dictates how humans use interfaces and with that comes many defacto reasons why a plain text page does not solve the problems users want to solve. Do you not think websites test into the optimal performing layouts and content distribution? If it worked better, we'd all be using it (it doesn't).

>Do you not think websites test into the optimal performing layouts and content distribution?

No, I think most website devs left to their devices optimize for least effort to create and maintain.

> No, I think most website devs left to their devices optimize for least effort to create and maintain.

...which is definitely not tables. Flexbox is much easier.

Sure, but there were a lot of ways that could have been solved with HTML standards.

It would be so great if there were more built-in interactive elements like tabs, modals, and tooltips. How many times have these incredibly basic things been re-created?

Yeah, all this time browser vendors should have been taking a "pave the cowpaths" approach to natively implementing stuff that everyone ends up reimplementing in CSS and JS. And HTML5 did a little of this, with e.g. date and color input fields. But they could have gone farther.

To disagree with my own point a bit, it’s unfortunate that the controls HTML5 added look different in every browser, and can’t be styled with CSS at all.

Somewhat subtle, but: Yes and No.

I'd say HTML for itself just gives us a way to give meaning or imply how something should be styled "headline of first order". In the end it's a markup language, not some magic styling tool.

How it is actually styled (in absence of CSS) is in the hands of the default rendering of your browser. That might very well be a very bad rendering, due to lack of knowledge/time/engagement of the people building/maintaining that renderer.

Also those renderes might come from a time and system where technical limitations where different, markup was different, lots of things were very different.

So I don't think we should expect HTML alone to "look nice" or work well in regards of readability.

> I'm quite certain that a large part of the web would need no CSS or just a few lines of it, if the basic (browser applied styles) were good. As in: designed

I think we would win a lot if browsers default styles were beautiful (as in: really good, not merely fancy) designed. Many websites then would need just a few lines to set some colors, style that weird-custom thing they do or make it feel just a bit more personal.

I think the bigger thing would be to have more semantic HTML. <dropdown>, <tab-area><tab>Content</tab></tab-area>, <carousel><slide>Content</slide></carousel>, <rich-text-editor>, etc. Instead we've got a million immature implementations of these that are slower because they are written in JS instead of native code, slowly break over time as they aren't maintained, and typically have terrible accessibility.

Yes. HTML gives the structure and hierarchy (if done properly) which is also what then gives the accessibility. CSS can do lovely things that will help a blind user with a screenreader not one bit unless you're kludging in "hacks" to give them extra hints for specialized use.

100%, and calling aesthetics an appeal to vanity and ego is a reductive take. I love that individual’s websites have different styles which reflect either them personally or their brand.

That can mean going all out in design, or having an HTML-only page like nothing. Both have value in their own way, and should reflect the creator to some extent.

Good CSS makes my users use the system less wrong.

Yeah, this is just some purist BS in my opinion.

Message / medium have always mixed together.

Even folks who say content needs to be figured out before presentation... it's not so cut and dry. Your medium shapes your message - they are not mutually exclusive and for the receiver of the message, the medium matters for their reception of the message.

I understand the sentiment that TONS of CSS is probably a bad use of time. But trying to demonize or otherwise attach aesthetics the label of "meaningless" is, in my opinion, just as much egocentric as they claim CSS to be.

use css, just enough with the animations!

> scroll the mousewheel: giant footer section slides up taking half the viewport

> move the mouse cursor up: giant ass header slide out menu drops down covering half the viewport

should be absolutely no motion on a page unless i specifically click on something, like play button or slide out button. and that includes parallax bullshit.

prefers-reduced-motion should be the DEFAULT not an override. ffs haven't we learnt anything in the last 20 years of web dev.

---

and f*k you to whoever thought having on hover popup autoplay boxes on youtube was a good idea.

> prefers-reduced-motion should be the DEFAULT not an override

I don’t personally feel nearly as strongly about the subject, but I wholeheartedly agree with this.

Even one of the most non-style sites on the web, Craigslist, has a stylesheet.

In my personal, obviously anecdotal, experience it's always the "technical" guys who think things like this. This is why we have UI/UX teams and we don't let programmers create visual interfaces.

Because reading words requires substantial styling enhancements over what the browser is already capable of? Has anyone picked up a book lately?

You need a UI team to create a page of readable text? That sounds like an expensive waste.

But it sounds like those 'UI' people think they know better and don't need suggestions from programmers about reading words, even though its what they do all day.

Fun fact: your text will look nothing like a book if you use HTML with no CSS and rely only on the user agent default style sheet.

Books are designed, too.

substantial styling enhancements.

If you don't like default settings, change them, that's why the options dialog exists.

Couldn’t you say that CSS is like a really powerful options dialog?

It's very funny that you seem to think reading code and reading a website are the exact same type of activities, and the same type of reading. They are not.

And I don't know where you've been for the last 30 some years, but the web is not a text only format, and the reason HTML was invented was specifically to be able to create a designed space where text can actually make sense and is not a gigantic wall of impossibly small black on white text.

Whats even more funny is HTML looks like a 'gigantic wall of impossibly small black and white text' when its rendered without a stylesheet.

Sounds like you ought to be doing the Richard Stallman approach to reading webpages and not commenting on whether or not CSS and design is needed. Back to the terminal with ye

Sounds like you should do less stereotyping of roles. You’re assumption that programmers don’t understand UI and need to stay away is exactly what the blog refers to when talking about ego. You think programmers output all their work in a terminal?

Your ego wrote against my ego so I'm thinking that's not the subject for you either. Anyway, I think if you truly valued the simplicity of text only then the terminal is the optimal place for this.

Print is also not a text only format; it's a designed space, with a mountain of effort given to typesetting and presentation.

Yet the market for text only novels is staggering.

I understand this and that's all well and good. Many (but not enough) offer "print" versions of pages, which could and should be translated to "text only" versions of pages. This isn't my issue. My issue is these <redacted> imagining that the web outright doesn't need design at all and that CSS is a terrible waste. And to me this is just about the most dull opinion on the subject that I can think of.

> My issue is these <redacted> imagining that the web outright doesn't need design at all and that CSS is a terrible waste.

While you do have some going to that extreme, I think it's mostly pushback against the insane amount of bloat and overbusy design out there. Some CSS can be useful, to improve readability and offer a little visual appeal. But I think maybe you missed my point.

Traditional books are typeset the way they are for a reason. No or minimal pictures. Block after block of text, broken up and spaced for readability, comprehensibility, and flow. Different types of books are laid out differently, but they mostly follow this theme. It's highly effective.

You kind of broadly have 3* categories of web pages on the web, as relates back to print:

* Book-types (mostly text in nature) * Magazine-types (more about graphic design, with content mixed in) * Advertisement flyer-types (sales pitches, mostly about design)

These are going to have different design requirements. There's plenty to write on the subject of design for these categories, but in the interest of getting to the point: there's an awful lot of the first category on the internet, and it really requires very little in the way of CSS. It certainly doesn't require hero images and 10MB of javascript. Blogs should read like newspaper articles, technical content should be typeset with similar minimalism to technical papers or books.

* There's a fourth category: webapps. My personal stance is that these don't belong on the web at all, but given that they're going to be, they obviously have far different design requirements, and are quite outside the scope of this discussion.

If your idea of a good site is a 3MB monster full of useless whitespace, hero images, carousels, hamburger menus and other modern design trends, maybe that's a sign we shouldn't let designers create visual interfaces.

I really dodged a bullet there huh? Since that isn't my idea of a "good" site necessarily. But if your idea of a "good" site is all function and no form, then maybe stick to designing abstract interfaces and not things actual people have to see.

Don't get me wrong, I like a website to look good. But it shouldn't compromise on speed on functionality.

All function and no form is much much better than broken function and broken form which is the modern web 2.0.

Feel free to find a site better than http://motherfuckingwebsite.com/

Why are you even browsing websites that have any design then? Why are you even browsing in anything other than lynx? Please spare me seeing that ideologically boring site again

Like I can barely imagine what your house might look like. Just like a purely functional weathered hovel with the absolutely barest essentials. A perfect prison cell

Web 2.0 design can be fixed so some extent by disabling javascript and sometimes disabling styles.

It's great that you figured out how to do it, congrats. A true computer guy

I like it because it means they will never be my competition for anything but incredibly niche/domain-specific boomer software people have no choice but to begrudgingly use.

But, you can get all of these things from HTML. Especially visual hierarchy and accessibility. The cornerstone of accessibility on the web is: does it display legibly and is it navigable without any CSS? CSS is eye candy. It's aesthetics. Those are not without value, but the value is not in the things you list.

> Design isn't just about aesthetics.

Why dismiss aesthetics out of hand like this, equating it with vanity and ego? Aesthetics are very important to people, possibly even more so than the information on the page.

Aesthetics are more important than content?? Where did you get that idea from?

Obviously, that depends on the purpose of the page/site. If the page is a brochure or advertisement, content is almost irrelevant; you could link to it, for buyers that wanted content. Brochures and ads are about feelings, and aesthetics are about feelings.

That's not what I think the www is for, but not everyone agrees with me.

>advertisement, content is almost irrelevant

Then it shouldn't exist from the start.

FWIW, I agree with you (and I don't see where I dismissed it), but the point is that even a certain type of utilitarian-inclined programmer is wrong on their own terms.

It's also the case that the default stylesheets for the web are terrible, for historical reasons. If the default stylesheets were reasonable, then at least 80% of the time you could just use semantic HTML5 and be sure that your presentation was at least OK in terms of visual hierarchy, accessibility, etc. As things actually stand, you need at minimum "100 bytes of CSS to Look Great Everywhere", and if that doesn't meet your needs, a classless stylesheet.