Yes, the user should ultimately have the final say about what colors, fonts, and sizes are used by their browser. We've handed way too much control over to the web developers. Web sites don't have to be pixel perfect. If I want to render text using Comic Sans by default, that shouldn't "break" anything.
> We've handed way too much control over to the web developers.
We lost this battle by 1999. And again when we started to deliver full web applications instead of documents.
I wish we had a second protocol that was more document and information focused. Something that gave zero control over programming or layout to providers.
I just want to exchange information P2P in a dense swarm approximating modern social media. I want to use my own client configured how I like it to choose what to ingest and how to flag it and present it.
Who are we kidding. With those as our choices, it's no wonder most people just use the face book.
Hyper scale businesses captured most of the internet's value and humans and turned tech into a series of walled gardens for eyeball attention doom scroll maximization. Retweeting the for you page is what some committee of product managers decided was best for us all. Who are we to question the architectures of power?
It almost sounds like a perverse weird utopia to imagine a world where we controlled all of the information flows ourselves. I can't think why we should have all the power.
the internet has become more accessible both to consumers and people trying to sell a product. it has become crowded in "the market" you refer to. but all the good things all still there, and are doing much better than they were. i still use all of those protocols and a bunch of newer ones.
I remember when the web came out, I said "This is just a prettier gopher." Seeing the end result of 30 years of web development, I kind of wish it stayed just a prettier gopher.
> If I want to render text using Comic Sans by default, that shouldn't "break" anything
Not sure how we could expect users to switch between whatever font they want, and things not breaking.
Different fonts both appear and have different sizes, so what might look perfect with one font (a button where the text is aligned in the center vertically/horizontally), can look massively different with another (say the font's characters are wider, so now the text either overflows or breaks into two parts, making the button "broken").
