If content is king, beauty is queen.

In the end I think that just text wouldn’t suffice. We could restrict the misuse of the presentational capabilities of HTML and CSS by using only semantical markup and a static CSS.

@Bret Kuhns: “Do you really think the web would be as popular as it is today if everyone used a text-based browsers like they did in the early days of the internet?” No, it was probably necessary to use design to attract new users to the web. But the more I use the web, the more unimportant the design of websites becomes. Nowadays, I read most content in my RSS reader ;-)

Yes, I know there are WYSIWYG tools out there. But for me it is not really WYSIWYG, because the “what you get” part depends on the browser you use.

@automagically: It is a good idea to use subdomains if you can automate that, but as soon as you have manually to maintain them, then it is too costly.

@Leandro Ardissone: Well, even if a site is standard-compliant it could be unaccessible because a wrong font size was used, or wrong color combinations, etc. With removing the possibility to define such things you remove also such problems ;-)

@Hypercubed: Yes, HTML was intended for content, especially for structuring content. But is such a structure needed? Or wouldn’t it be more interesting to see what structures would emerge?

@KesheR: Yes, design is important for humans. But there are areas where design is not that important: emails, forums, sms, newspapers, books, and IMHO the web.

I think it is not necessary to rebuild the web technologies from scratch (and almost impossible). An evolutionary process is better, and with RSS we currently see such an evolutionary step.

@ryan & scott lewis: That’s true, with the blogging tools it is relatively easy to publish something. But for me the format used on the web should be like an extension of the plain text format, which even a non-technical person can edit with every editor.

To look at it from the opposite direction: HTML is a horrible format for presenting a document. Our minds aren’t trained to jump over things like «BOLD» and «ITALIC» and just focus on the content. Not to mention the little dance you have to go through to get the page in the first place, I mean, who though GET / HTTP/1.0 was a human-friendly way to request HTML pages anyway?

We have these immensely powerful parsers, thick network clients, and renderers dedicated to reading HTML and presenting it’s contents to us in a human friendly-way. When we read webpages we ignore the HTML and focus on the content. All that is required is to build tools that allow us to do the same when creating content.

WordPress, Blogger, etc., are just part of the infrastructure. The mythical ‘average user’ shouldn’t be expected to manage files in an Apache DocRoot any more than they should be expected to build a server, set up DNS entries, or write a TCP stack.

For further discussion: should web technologies be rebuilt from scratch?

Otherwise, plain text is great. I love to read RSS for this reason, I have my reader with plain text and images from the post/article which becomes in a faster and clean reading. I think that this is the main reason for RSS is created apart of the read-all-at-the-same-place.

I will love to see all the internet like old BBS with only text and design means ASCII draws all around.

I like the idea discussed on Digg a while back, of just providing different versions of the site under subdomains. Like txt.example.com would be straight up text files, or look basic like Craigslist, since you gotta have links and forms at least! Or do you? Hmm. I can see benefits of creating a basic version of your site, akin to craigslist. Might be really helpful for people with disabilities (and avoiding law suits, unlike Target), and could just use the same content from the database of the normal site. I start out with a basic wireframe skeleton type site with no styling while writing the php and testing forms anyways, why not keep it for that subdomain?

And in response to “HTML and CSS are (too) complex, which makes it difficult for non-technical people to create websites”. Does WYSIWYG ring a bell? It’s not the perfect solution, but it works for non-technical people. I can think of a few small businesses that rely on Dreamweaver to create their online presence.