It's so odd that gopher sounds like a fresh solution to this over-proliferation of design. I wonder if there's potential for a modern version.

I guess the problem is our attention economy. As a designer your job is to hold attention, and this drives design trends so far from competitors that usability suffers.

Although we do see that people love the uniformity of the big social networks. I find Twitter's clean timeline much more helpful than visiting individual websites.

I wonder if we'll continue to see a trend of the web separated into app-level experiences & information silos. I'm thinking there's a big void in the market for something like squarespace meets tumblr.

The uniformity is definitely a big plus on sites like Facebook and Twitter. The rest of the internet feels like Myspace by comparison.

You should try a text-based browser like Lynx (http://lynx.isc.org/). All CSS and JavaScript is stripped away, leaving the user with unaltered HTML.

In my opinion, all sites should be usable like this. Styles and scripts should merely be enhancements, not requirements.

The problem is that we use the internet for more than just sites, we use it for web applications now too. Making sure the site works without javascript is usually possible, but often much more work. For sites that are presenting information to me, or where I'm interacting in a minimal way, a well defined static interface is preferable. For complex applications, I would definitely prefer a more rich experience than is provided by HTML+CSS and HTTP (although with HTML5 it's not as bad as it used to be).

I recently realized how often web developers defending the status quo have internalized a circular reasoning regarding "what the Internet is for". So the Internet is for web applications now, so we need to have all that stupid crap in CSS and dump metric tons of JavaScript on everyone. But if you suggest that maybe we should then drop the content/layout "separation" and make CSS actually nice to work with, the same people will tell you that "web is for documents", so what we have now is good.

I'm beginning to wonder if we shouldn't split the Internet into two - one for cloud apps and another for content - and design the tech stacks accordingly.

I'm fairly sure you're just conflating two separate opinions from many, many different people, and using your personal biases to crap on that conflation, so that you can bolster a fairly weak point.

Definitely true. But I've noticed that web applications are usually not awful design offenders.

An unusable webapp frustrates users and drives them off, but an informational page trying to be some kind of 1920's prediction of a futuristic interactive magazine is annoying at most. I can always figure out how to read the text, so I just put up with the stupid design.

>In my opinion, all sites should be usable like this. Styles and scripts should merely be enhancements, not requirements.

As much as I agree, many sites are not usable like this :(

And there are aspects of CSS that I do want to keep, like making the navigation lists properly horizontal (and in some cases, nested with hovers). Without CSS, you sometimes have to scroll through several pages of expanded out header/navigation before you find the content.