Okay, but they only did that because browsers put tools like CSS/JS in their hands to let them.
I think it was a bad choice on the browsers' part. It's a totally abdication of the browser's responsibility to render things nicely and configurably for the user. Worse, javascript is bundled malware: you're letting websites execute arbitrary code on the user's machine.
Tracking, terrible website accessibility, and various dark patterns are a direct result of this. Instead of forcing websites to conform to a document format and giving users control over how that document behaves and is rendered, browsers given those powers to websites, and unsurprisingly, this has resulted in user-hostile behaviors. And it's not all peachy for websites either: websites can do a lot more with CSS/JS, but websites also have to do a lot more.
One of my side projects is a web browser which accepts various document types (i.e. image, slide show, article, login form) and renders them. Style/behavior is configurable by the user when possible, but the site serving the document has no control over styling/behavior--they only get to serve up documents which conform to the semantics of the document type. I doubt this will ever take off, but it's been an interesting and fun project so far.
I think it was a bad choice on the browsers' part. It's a totally abdication of the browser's responsibility to render things nicely and configurably for the user. Worse, javascript is bundled malware: you're letting websites execute arbitrary code on the user's machine.
Tracking, terrible website accessibility, and various dark patterns are a direct result of this. Instead of forcing websites to conform to a document format and giving users control over how that document behaves and is rendered, browsers given those powers to websites, and unsurprisingly, this has resulted in user-hostile behaviors. And it's not all peachy for websites either: websites can do a lot more with CSS/JS, but websites also have to do a lot more.
One of my side projects is a web browser which accepts various document types (i.e. image, slide show, article, login form) and renders them. Style/behavior is configurable by the user when possible, but the site serving the document has no control over styling/behavior--they only get to serve up documents which conform to the semantics of the document type. I doubt this will ever take off, but it's been an interesting and fun project so far.