Almost always in the past, when there was a choice (i.e., when it
wasn't work with a requirement for web pages to look just like
pictures drawn by a designer), I tried to stick to fairly minimal CSS
on web pages: just a few lines to make things look fine in major web
browsers with default settings, without breaking it for others.
There always was some awkwardness though: for instance, until recently
there was no way to determine whether a user prefers a dark or a light
color theme; mobile browsers require an explicit instruction to make
them render documents properly (and not with a zoomed-out hack);
changing user's preferred fonts is bad, but apparently many users have
default fonts they don't like, and the same goes for colors (and even
things like authentication forms); one can provide alternate
stylesheets (as I did for some time), but users are not likely to
choose from those, and it'd be awkward to do anyway. So whichever
combination of solutions one picks, it won't be perfect. Additionally,
it's awkward and wrong to fix client's assumed configuration via CSS.
I was musing about removing CSS completely from my personal web page
for a while, but that felt like quite a bold move: in practice that
would make the documents to look pretty bad for most users. Yet that's
the right thing to do, while the styling problem should rather be
solved in a few major graphical web browsers, not on every website
separately. So I finally did it recently, and it didn't feel as
awkward as I thought it would: it looks basically the same to me
(thanks to Stylus in FF, and other web browsers just ignoring CSS),
and from recent web browsing experience on the new gaming computer
with mostly default settings, I've learned/recalled that most of the
websites are awful but close to the defaults (i.e., black-on-white)
anyway, so it won't even stand out (styling-wise, that is; apparently
it's quite rare for a website to not be broken in multiple other ways,
even in a recent version of a major web browser with default settings,
so a JS- and CSS-free website may still stand out for being usable).
So yay, this may be the final solution to styling for me.
