90% of the JS being loaded is for tracking to increase advertising revenue. Much of the styling for a site that has no advertising can be fairly light.
If we focused less on revenue generation we'd have a much much smoother web experience that would run quickly on mobile devices.
I would flip that: we need to explore ways to generate revenue which don't rely on practices like trackers, structuring content to inflate page-views, etc. which don't benefit the user.
The most obvious example I'd use is ArsTechnica's approach of disabling ads for subscribers – I notice this any time I use a new browser and pages take twice as long to load because web performance just isn't a priority in the ad world.
But then rather than poor content, there would be next to no content (for the masses) because business have expenses ;)
Speaking seriously, yeah I see what you mean. Maybe reducing ads and improving speed would result in better UX, which would lead to better user retention, which would leave to more ad clicks. But that's a lot of maybes. Why risk that if people are used to ads? Ads often come when subscription is not an option.
You can explore other revenue sources (e.g. affiliate) but they are usually not widely applicable. And other than that, there's not much to do. I don't really think there exists a business model which could replace ads (when, again, subscription is not an option).
Yeah. That sucks. But that's the reality.
Actually yes this is the use-case I was referring to.
HTML has semantics to define sections, headers, etc.. but it doesn't manage them in any way.
If you write HTML that define sections, for example, it's no different than if you write HTML without sections.
Ultimately, I don't think of the web as a page-based medium, it's document-based. Electronic documents that want to mimic pages are a relic from the past, imo. What you seem to want should probably be implemented as browser plugins.
What I read was that it's not for "more ad displays", although closely related. It's because news sites keep (and market themselves based on) a "pageviews" metric, so they try to get as many pageviews as possible out of each piece of content.
Long articles and books are more comfortable to read if they are paginated: one small tap, one pageful of new stuff. Far more convenient and less prone to losing your place than scrolling.
You may like pagination but I do not, and I would argue its better suited as an option, not dictated by the author.
I am not talking about fixed pages or clickbait websites where you have to scroll anyway and then click a "Next" button, but about having a flexible way to enable pagination of content.
That pagination is one of the reasons why for me the best way to read something like the stories in http://longreads.com/ is on Instapaper (or a similar tool).
Why do you need page transitions for articles at all? The only reason I can think of is for more ad displays. Ok, if you have, say, a long manual with multiple chapters that would be several hundred pages when printed it can be nice to break it up, but that's probably not what you meant.
> photo galleries - after 25 years, why isn't there a standard user experience for viewing photos related to articles?
Because there's no one size fits all solution. Look into magazines, newspapers, etc. After a few centuries there is still no standard. Grouped, with captions, position, size, etc.
> why do we need to write CSS to create a basic readable document in the first place
You don't. Browsers can display semantic markup just fine without any CSS. The fact that you even ask this question is why you write CSS, because different people in different times expect different styling, and they don't think the default style is pretty. I agree that the default styles could be improved though after 20 years, but that could lead to breakage of current CSS styles, and why risk that if everybody uses CSS anyway?
And the fact that I wrote this comment is just another reason why you have to write CSS: because not everybody agrees on how the web should look.