It sounds like someone forgot that CSS is not some independent technology from HTML, a webpage is "HTML+CSS", it's one thing. Sure, browsers injects a shitty default style if you just need to put some plain text data out there, but HTML just semantically marks up your data, CSS is what makes it easy to read and understand.
If you proclaim that CSS is "for vanity", your stables must have an awfully big ladder for getting on your horse.
Shall we take it one step further? Why even bother with HTML, semantic markup is just as much vanity as CSS: just put .txt files on the web. People can trivially copy-and-paste links to other files anyway, they copy-and-paste text all the time. Adding <a> elements is basically just browser candy. As long as the information's high quality, people will want to read it, right?
It sounds like someone forgot that HTML and CSS are separate technologies, with one being born years before the other. In the beginning, the web was HTML.
Sure, CSS is useful. But a lot of it is over-designed. The web in general, is over-designed.
Sure, that's like, my opinion. But no, they're not "one thing".
> As long as the information's high quality, people will want to read it, right?
I do. Probably, there's a fundamental difference in what we consider readable. I don't think pure HTML as rendered by modern browsers is necessarily ideal, but it's generally readable. Most of the extra elements, styling, javascript, pictures etc. on modern pages distract from the actual content and make it harder for me to read it.
nope, it's definitely just for vanity. it will be hard to explain that on a forum dedicated to people whose work revolves around upholding this myth, though. html not being readable without css is a bug or bad positioning. i would never design a document format that requires something as complex as css to be readable. anyway i find sites that use just plain default html readable. one big mistake people make is to let their browser take up a full widescreen monitor on such pages. the fact that the browser tries to be the OS discourages them from resizing it (windows+left on windows or gnome or the equivalent on windows is enough). its mostly the tables (iirc) that look like crap, even though they didn't have to
"CSS" is as complex as you need it to be. Just because you're not a three star chef doesn't mean you can't cook at least good tasting food, and just because you have no idea how the hell to implement a fluid CSS grid with parallal and keyframe animations that work at all breakpoints for all devices in both light and dark mode doesn't mean you can't make your document better with even a modicum of dead simple basic CSS.
Don't pretend that CSS is hard.
Yes, of course crazy CSS mastery to make vanity artworks on the web is hard, and yes doing stupid things with z-layer ordering and absolute vs relative positioning is the classic "family guy trying to work the blinds" gif, but decent CSS that makes information easier to read for a wide variety of people (including ESL, visually impaired, etc.) is barely any effort, and pretending we're all worse off because of CSS and that having a document format that lets you style your content with is a terrible idea is just willfully stupid.
(on that note: oh look, something that every single DTP product ever made supports, guess those are all terrible too, and I suppose that sarcastic joke about us all just using .txt files should get repeated here)
if i was to implement a browser that could properly render CSS for some given set of real life scenarios i would be getting back to you in 100 years. paying tax, banking, trading academic literature should not rely on a magazine formatting jenga puzzle
Ah yes, the myth of rejecting nihilism. Just like my last restaurant visit where I ordered stale bread and water. Enough for survival, the rest is pure vanity.
If you proclaim that CSS is "for vanity", your stables must have an awfully big ladder for getting on your horse.
Shall we take it one step further? Why even bother with HTML, semantic markup is just as much vanity as CSS: just put .txt files on the web. People can trivially copy-and-paste links to other files anyway, they copy-and-paste text all the time. Adding <a> elements is basically just browser candy. As long as the information's high quality, people will want to read it, right?