> 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 with an explicit "app mode" for such sites. But 99.999999% of what I read would do vastly better with uniform presentation.
I think that depends heavily on what you use the web for. You and I likely read a lot on the web. Some people might stick largely to Facebook and Gmail. There are people that spend a lot of time in Github, and others that spend very little. Some people use a lot of online organizational and collaboration tools, others none.
> More attention to content and semantic construction. Less to layout frippery.
What you call layout frippery, someone else desires. This sounds suspiciously like remaking the web for your use cases, not for general use cases (which are always changing). But I'm not sure there's even a problem to address, you already addressed through referencing "readability modes" as an example of presentation styles that do work well. Why isn't that your solution to this perceived problem?
It feels like you're trying to achieve the equivalent of forcing all the printers to agree to not print magazines that don't conform to someone's opinion of what a good magazine is. I'm just not sure why that's even desirable.
> Something tells me you'll not be convinced.
No, not yet, if I understand your position correctly.
Defaulting to standard formats, and, on the basis of improved semantic parsing and ranking, promoting them through higher Search rankings (ceterus paribus) would be a Good Thing.
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?
I don't really have any issue with most of what you are saying, except "The lack of a publishing gateway, even a minimal one which enforces markup correctness to the Web is a problem.", and my issue with that really depends on how what you mean by "problem". Sure, a publishing gateway would enforce some conformity, and some level of conformity is beneficial (I'll even allow that more conformity than we currently have would be beneficial), but too much conformity is not. Too much conformity breeds stagnation. So i'll re-frame my stance: How do you enforce or encourage conformity without going to far? How do you keep the entity or entities you've entrusted this task to from going to far?
> You're also going back to ignoring points raised earlier in this conversation about security, privacy, and usability.
I was just working off your points, which all seemed to be about usability. I've been treating this discussion as somewhat distinct from that one. I can definitely make arguments about conformity having it's own negative aspects with regard to security.
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 with an explicit "app mode" for such sites. But 99.999999% of what I read would do vastly better with uniform presentation.
I think that depends heavily on what you use the web for. You and I likely read a lot on the web. Some people might stick largely to Facebook and Gmail. There are people that spend a lot of time in Github, and others that spend very little. Some people use a lot of online organizational and collaboration tools, others none.
> More attention to content and semantic construction. Less to layout frippery.
What you call layout frippery, someone else desires. This sounds suspiciously like remaking the web for your use cases, not for general use cases (which are always changing). But I'm not sure there's even a problem to address, you already addressed through referencing "readability modes" as an example of presentation styles that do work well. Why isn't that your solution to this perceived problem?
It feels like you're trying to achieve the equivalent of forcing all the printers to agree to not print magazines that don't conform to someone's opinion of what a good magazine is. I'm just not sure why that's even desirable.
> Something tells me you'll not be convinced.
No, not yet, if I understand your position correctly.