Fast, "simple" and minimalist are hard things to do right. People spend their lives studying things like typography and design. There's a lot of value there an

Fast, "simple" and minimalist are hard things to do right. People spend their lives studying things like typography and design. There's a lot of value there and its NOT entirely a matter of taste. Tossing out a framework means you're wading out into hit or miss territory and creating a lot more work for yourself. Knuth/Norvig/Kernigan can easily get away with naked HTML (although I see that Knuth has really gone bonkers and added a short stanza of css). Normal folks who dare create a website will fare better if they stand on some shoulders for their visual styling.