Whenever I see something like this I always wonder how we came to allow website authors to dictate how their content is displayed on other people's computers. I know I can use greasemonkey or whatever to hack something together (or stick to lynx), but why don't websites generally just deliver text and leave the decision of how to render it up to me?
1. Most people just want a website to work. (I know I do)
2. Because how are you gonna do support on a website when the website looks different for everyone involved? Are you only going to offer support for the basic text version? In that case, aren't you still kind off deciding how it looks, only now it looks ugly?
3. Branding. You want people to instantly recognize your product/brand.
4. To push features you want to be used, for better (handy new ones) or worse (advertising, generating bullshit metrics).
Probably a lot more than, but these just popped in my mind.
> Are you only going to offer support for the basic text version? In that case, aren't you still kind off deciding how it looks, only now it looks ugly?
You can do both. Offer CSS, but keep the site usable without it. The same goes for every feature: JS, images (fallback to alt-text), etc. Non-HTML resources should usually be optional enhancements.
I came here to post the same observation as OP. Used to be, you’d set default colors in your browser, and those would be used to render all web sites. No need to use a plug-in, override CSS per-site. If you wanted to, you could have the web site render into your own “brick wall” background.
Over time, browsers have ceded more and more control over layout and colors to web developers, and got busy burying/deprecating the browser-side defaults... to the point where user preference is an afterthought now, and almost universally ignored by sites. Now you have to use big hammers like disabling CSS and JavaScript in order to have any say as a user. Nobody likes when your native desktop application's UI ignores your system default colors and forces their own color scheme, yet this is acceptable on the web.
Basically, yes. Not unique css mind you, but a single nicely readable (for me) set of styles for everything. This stoves a bunch of accessibility problems too. Why is this weird?
No, just one global stylesheet that all websites obey without breaking. The (dead) dream of the ideal user agent is a program that lets you browse with your preferred color scheme, fonts, font size, etc; websites look just like any other program. Or not, if you prefer. Content is dictated by the authors but appearance is dictated by the user-agent.
The idea of the user agent dictating presentation rather than the content author is kind of dead on today's modern web; while it's certainly possible to set a global stylesheet, doing so creates an incredibly frustrating game of trial-and-error as some websites break while others work fine.
The idea does live on outside the mainstream in ideas like Gemini, Gopher, and a small subset of the Web that focuses on textual content with very conservative progressive enhancement.
Most websites should be able to work just fine with nothing but HTML. That doesn not mean that they should actually be just HTML (my website certainly isn't); it means that enhancements like CSS and JS should be progressive. Exceptions exist, obviously.
Not sure if the questions are rhetorical, but in case if not, the history of allowing that is reflected in www-talk archives [0], and in articles such as [1]. Basically (and AIUI), some publishers wanted that, users didn't object too much, and it happened -- same as with a bunch of related technologies.
I get where you are coming from in an ideal sense, I’ll entertain the idea instead of for fun.
This is obviously for a specific type of user who is very very much the minority. Any idea that this would work for a broad audience should be thrown away, because your friend Steve in sales doesn’t give a shit about writing their own CSS.
I think what you have left after that is serving two different versions of your content. One has its own styling and the other does not. Don’t pretend that the markup isn’t tied to the CSS, and that the unstyled version just doesn’t apply CSS, because there will always be coupling between the two for any moderately complex site. Just have two deliverables and be done with it.
Of course, duplicating the content is suboptimal. You could have a source of truth for the actual content of the site that is used to build deliverables with, employing a clever build process.
I mean, I’ll just stop there because this sounds like way too much work, being put on the content creator to satisfy an insanely small number of their users. If you want to style the content on your own, just do it. Delete all style sheets and inline styles and apply your own. It’ll be hard work, and the markup will be all wrong for that type of work, but it can be done if it’s really really necessary.
All browsers used to have the concept of a user stylesheet. That was before corporate greed and control took over.
The "modern web" and associated software is designed to take control away from users, so that authors can slowly give back an illusion of it.
I've always been writing my own CSS for sites whose style but not content irritated me. Mostly when they change to some idiotic fad, so I can put it back.
