I am increasingly of the opinion that we need to ditch HTML in order to protect and advance the open web. We've lost something valuable in this brave new HTML-as-a-compile-target future. The original intention of HTML was to serve as a a lightweight,
semantic language that people could use to produce documents that were more-or-less structurally understandable (by both humans and computers). Now it's so muddy that we may as well be downloading binary files. (Sometimes we are.)
Gone are the days when you could disable custom CSS and still kinda-sorta navigate the web. These days, it is en vogue to tightly couple what we're seeing on an HTML page (a product listing, a social media post) with instructions about how to render it (250px wide, black background, blinking marquee text). This is great for the tech companies that are producing these HTML blobs, because they have a lot of control over what they're showing to their users. It's only good for the users if they're 100% happy with how the data is being presented. I don't know about you, but I'm rarely happy these days. To say nothing for users with more stringent accessibility requirements.
I wonder if there's a future where we all use a different kind of web browser -- one that doesn't accept any styling instructions from the websites it's visiting. It would probably need to be built on top of accepted data types for various things, like product listings or social media posts. That way, it wouldn't matter whether I was looking at a product on Amazon, Ebay or Etsy. I could tell my browser that I want all product listings to be rendered in dark mode, with a thumbnail preview image instead of a full-sized one, regardless of what site I'm currently on.
Google is already in the process of trying to become this kind of "browser". It has the advantage of being the "front door" of the internet in doing so. It aggregates, and homogenizes, similar documents from various companies and presents them in a uniform way on the results page (eg, hotels, flights, word definitions).
I don't want to rely on Google to do this for me. I want the documents of the web to be semantically meaningful to the point where my browser can make opinionated decisions about how to style the information I'm downloading.