Odd that none of your parent comments mentioned designers, yet you felt they were being criticized.
Why does looking like this (rms's website) equate to unusable? It is unfancy, unadorned, a bit unorganized, yet it is highly usable. The default unstyled look of the Internet was "designed" to be highly readable: paragraph blocks, list items, contrasting and underlined links, line separators, etc.
You've already been corrected on your derogatory use of hipster and why reading mode is just a kludge. What I wanted to point out was that the "CSS hasn't loaded" moment is a symptom of a broken Internet. The layers added to the Internet fail, they fail noticeably, they fail ungracefully, and people are annoyed by the failure.
It's not about designers vs. hipsters vs. raw HTML, it should really be about adding layers to the Internet in a way that isn't so broken and/or breakable. The fact that you can't zoom some websites on mobile means someone is breaking the Internet (either the page creators or the mobile browser devs). The fact that your browser can refresh a page with unsubmitted input and lose your work means someone is breaking the Internet (again, it's a conspiracy of page creators/designers and browser devs).
No, the real problem is when people invent new layers and extensions that aren't robust and don't support all the functionally of the old layers, but everybody adopts them because new and shiny and they allow some new features. Since you bring up designers, I will say that all too often the designers are the ones pushing these new extensions, without enough consideration for usability and compatibility.
Why does looking like this (rms's website) equate to unusable? It is unfancy, unadorned, a bit unorganized, yet it is highly usable. The default unstyled look of the Internet was "designed" to be highly readable: paragraph blocks, list items, contrasting and underlined links, line separators, etc.
You've already been corrected on your derogatory use of hipster and why reading mode is just a kludge. What I wanted to point out was that the "CSS hasn't loaded" moment is a symptom of a broken Internet. The layers added to the Internet fail, they fail noticeably, they fail ungracefully, and people are annoyed by the failure.
It's not about designers vs. hipsters vs. raw HTML, it should really be about adding layers to the Internet in a way that isn't so broken and/or breakable. The fact that you can't zoom some websites on mobile means someone is breaking the Internet (either the page creators or the mobile browser devs). The fact that your browser can refresh a page with unsubmitted input and lose your work means someone is breaking the Internet (again, it's a conspiracy of page creators/designers and browser devs).
No, the real problem is when people invent new layers and extensions that aren't robust and don't support all the functionally of the old layers, but everybody adopts them because new and shiny and they allow some new features. Since you bring up designers, I will say that all too often the designers are the ones pushing these new extensions, without enough consideration for usability and compatibility.