Honestly I feel these sorta of posts are just trolling for views. Hey if you wanna make your site feel like a '90s/Brutalist design throwback that's cool. But don't act like you're a more enlightened developer.

When you're just relying on browser defaults and there no basic styles to make the text readable. The pages are a challenge to understand. You can have plain html but using CSS to create some visual hierarchy would go a long way. Feels like there's two text sizes and two colors.

I'd say the author is one of the most respected tech bloggers out there.

With pure HTML and possibly some cleanly included JS he could get any visual appearance he wants, such as the common hero video or the effects you see where scrolling manifests differently as you scroll through different parts of the document.

You can be a good writer but none of that really changes the thrust of the parents point which, I think, is that: if you want easy upvotes on a site like this, you can just post some variation of "javascript bad, web 1.0 html good." If you can stretch this idea into 3 or more paragraphs, even if you say fundamentally nothing new that hasn't already been seen 100 times, you're virtually guaranteed to get a bunch of upvotes and "DAE?" comments about how epic of an approach it is.

In this case though, the author isn't submitting it, so it's not like they're the culprit. But even if they were it's also not really an indictment of any sort either; happens to everyone who writes online; it's the siren song of "engagement" with your work. (Lots of people here want to believe this site is somehow fundamentally different from Reddit or any other forum where "internet points" dictate the flow of content. It isn't; the tics and triggers are just different. Topics like this are a good example.)

> With pure HTML and possibly some cleanly included JS he could get any visual appearance he wants

With default browser font sizing and spacing? Yeah, sure, you can get any bad look you want from pure HTML and some JS. CSS is practically mandatory for webpage readability these days, but it's all a moot point since the OP doesn't seem to be arguing against CSS in any form anyway (and even literally admits he uses it.) Honestly the linked support site is mostly OK in this regard; though I'd blow up the font size a point/point-and-a-half more, add a tiny bit more line spacing, and make the margins bigger.

> no basic styles to make the text readable

You mean dark grey text on light grey background?

Or a mobile stylesheet that displays one paragraph and half a photo on a 5k monitor and makes you scroll for the rest?

Only two CSS rules can enhance the readability a lot on my screen:

  body { font-family: helvetica; line-height: 1.5; }

That's the thing, the author here is using CSS and the hierarchy is still very poor and difficult to parse. It's the worst of both worlds.

The very short post says:

"our current support site [https://support.cs.toronto.edu/] is that most basic thing, a bunch of static .html files sitting in a filesystem (and a static file of CSS, and some Javascript to drop in a header on all pages)."

It's ironic you should call anything UNIX baggage since that whole website is a few kilobytes and renders instantly. As opposed to any 5MB JS-filled flaming cistern of a site a modern developer would make.

That's a false dichotomy. There are plenty of <100KB sites that look good, render instantly, and work very well.

You must be from 1995 or something because I haven't seen one popular site like that.

HTML comments to Stack Overflow pages? Display: table? Floats for layout?

That page is not an example of what the post is about: it's written with his Wiki software: https://utcc.utoronto.ca/~cks/space/dwiki/DWiki

At that point they might as well have hired it out to someone on fiverrr (not a dig at people who work fiverrr at all.)