HTML is all you need to make a website
&quot;Some people claimed that websites without CSS and JavaScript are &quot;bland&quot;. Who cares? If your content is readable and accessible without the noisy bells and whistles of loading animations and a fancy-pants design, then ship it.<p>Someone else said HTML-only websites are &quot;ugly as hell.&quot; I disagree. They&#x27;re beautiful.&quot;<p>Is the www an information system for hyperlinking and sharing information over an internet or is it something else.  Is the www the software program (e.g., &quot;browser&quot;) used to access it.<p>Imagine if people criticised books for the fonts they are printed in, how the paragraphs are formatted, whether they have images, and so on.  Imagine if readers were forced to wear special reading glasses to see the text.<p>Generally, book reviews focus only on the textual content not the presentation.  I wonder why.<p>Using a text-only browser (not Lynx, mind you), I can read content faster and easier, with less distraction, than I can using a graphical browser running Javascript provided by an advertising company.  YMMV.<p>As it happens, I can discuss www content submitted to HN with folks who are using such graphical browsers.  Yet I cannot see the same fonts, images or formatting, nor do I execute any Javascript.  For example, I read the text of the OP website and I am commenting on it here, but I have no idea what it looks like in a popular, &quot;modern&quot; graphical browser running Javascript and controlled by an advertising company.  How is this possible.<p>It seems to me there is a functional aspect of www content, i.e., information, that is independent of the software used to view it.<p>Web developers like to assume there are only a handful of software programs that can be used to view www content, and thus by manipulating those programs they can control how www content appears to the reader.  In practice, given the takeover of the www by &quot;tech&quot; companies living off advertising and VC money, that may be true.  However text is text.  I can view and process it with an infinite variety of software.  I can make it look however I wish on the screen.<p>The www can be whatever someone wants it to be, as text can be extracted and manipulated in an infinite number of ways.  Users of the www can, in theory, process the information found via the www in any way they choose.1<p>1. For example, GPT-3 was created using a text-only corpus extracted from the www, namely Wikipedia and Common Crawl.  Web developer Javascript is ignored.