Earlier quoted context omitted.
The fact of standard templates needn't prevent the possibility of novel templates. But it ought make the prospect slightly more user-controllable. Design-by-committee isn't the alternative to design-by-fuckwits, the present mode. Github and Gmail are both tools which now face the dilemma of gratuitous changes -- many of the recent innovations haven't done much for usability, for numerous reasons (familiarity itself i…
> The fact of standard templates needn't prevent the possibility of novel templates. If your stance is "provide well established default templates, but don't enforce their use", then I have no disagreement. That's not how I interpreted "I've considered what might be necessary to dispose of server-side CSS." > Github, Gmail, Google Maps, etc., are largely the exception to long-form informational content pages. I'm OK…
Among the problems of present Web design is that the Web is an error condition (there's a wonderful essay exploring this), and browsers default to allowing broken behavior, even adapting themselves to it, explicitly.
The lack of a publishing gateway, even a minimal one which enforces markup correctness to the Web is a problem.
Layout frippery as pertains textual content has a rather well-supported basis. Complexity is the enemy of reliability, and more complex layouts offer far more ways for sites to break. That's a well-established fact that successive generations eventual learn (or fail to learn) at their peril.
(The phrase "Complexity is the enemy" itself dates to the 1950s. I'd have to check the year, but have remarked on it before. Source is The Economist newspaper.)
I've seen what happens when documents and other media are aimed at very specific readers. Eventually, they rot.
Bog-standard HTML (or some alternative markup -- I'm increasingly partial to LaTeX) tends, strongly, to avoid this.
You're also going back to ignoring points raised earlier in this conversation about security, privacy, and usability.
And yes, if there's a call for an app-based runtime environment, which Google seem quite bent on producing, well, that's a thing. But no need to fuck up the game for the rest of us.
And models which prove useful could and should be incorporated.
I'm pretty gobstopped, for example, that 25 years after its introduction there's no affordance in HTML for notes (e.g., footnotes, endnotes, sidenotes, as presentation is a client issue), or for hierarchical presentation, e.g., of comments threads.
On can create nested hierarchies, but one with an integrated expand/collapse/sort/filter functionality doesn't exist. This was extant in Usenet newsreaders and mail clients 20 years ago. Why not the Web?