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.