For publishers of content plain html and some little css would get you a result that's readable, and responsive (I think a better word for this is adaptive), if

For publishers of content plain html and some little css would get you a result that's readable, and responsive (I think a better word for this is adaptive), if the authors are willing to give up their prescriptivisism on the rendering of their content. Compliant use of html and css almost always results in a page which the browser will know to display the best way with regards to the medium. But once one's determined to impose a certain layout no matter what, he takes on the browsers duty, and actually has to work towards implementing an abstraction layer that takes care of the incompatibilities of all different web browsers out there. Now there are libraries for this, so he fetches and uses them to unnecessarily impose his style. Eventually this is a needless burden on both him and the user, as while the megabytes pile up, load speed and performance decrease and Internet bills increase in price. As things skip and grow and shrink on the screen, the UX becomes cumbersome too. But if the primitives of html and css are used, all these issues are irrelevant. Another factor that complicates web page development is ads. They bring a huge pile of Javascript with them, but they go ignored most of the time and usually are a burden to the user. Ad providers, instead of publishing ads that would indeed get clicked intentionally (like the Deck network), bribe the publishers paying for user actions that aren't actual impressions. Thus they also create exaggerated statistics which they use to lure low quality ads which get the most clicks from accidental behaviour, leading to worse and worse ads that do whatever to catch attention but be actually interesting. Lastly, it is a fact that coding Javascript is more fun than writing a document. For the web developer, rendering innyeractive graphics with Javascript is certainly more fun than making them with R or gnuplot and insert into the page with an img tag and providing data and code used to generate them.