I was always a little disappointed with how most web browsers choose to render HTML pages that had no explicit styling information. I'm not necessarily saying web browsers should have defaults as opinionated as simple.css, but the default page margins, padding, text styles, headings, etc that they picked aren't particularly attractive.
Opinionated web developers will override the defaults no matter what they are, but if the convention was to have more attractive defaults I wonder if that would have resulted in a larger share of personal websites and blogs created using plain HTML.
Oh absolutely, that ship has long since sailed, it's just me lamenting a world that could have been if something closer to simple.css or tufte-css had been the norm.
Though with "reader mode" becoming more popular I wonder if there's a place for a browser with more opinionated defaults.
There's a lot of sites between pure html and modern css. "Simply" rendering things differently would definitely break a lot of sites. Just imagine if browsers started defaulting to *{box-sizing: border-box;}.
There's a reason why the CSS ["reset"][1] is still with us - the lower level user-agent stylesheet never really adopted any of this stuff. Presumably, this was to reduce the delta between browser engines (vendor prefixes, etc, etc.) but it would be nice to see some movement in this area.
I was always a little disappointed with how most web browsers choose to render HTML pages that had no explicit styling information. I'm not necessarily saying web browsers should have defaults as opinionated as simple.css, but the default page margins, padding, text styles, headings, etc that they picked aren't particularly attractive.
Opinionated web developers will override the defaults no matter what they are, but if the convention was to have more attractive defaults I wonder if that would have resulted in a larger share of personal websites and blogs created using plain HTML.