>Without CSS, what this would look like is pure data -- a list of animals with a picture and their relevant depth printed next to them. It would be perfectly fu

>Without CSS, what this would look like is pure data -- a list of animals with a picture and their relevant depth printed next to them. It would be perfectly functional. This is your render target: "what is the information that I wish to convey?" No. The author wishes to convey a multimedia experience. This is evident, the page is unique because of this. The author does not care to convey just textual information. You're just breaking down the core components of the system and picking the one that's required to have any semblance of a page. The "fun touches" are ultimately required. It's like a script vs. a movie, the movie isn't required and the script is ultimately all that's needed but nobody cares about the script do they? It's not even embedded in the movie. >I want to be clear here -- I'm not advocating for a less experimental, uglier web. The reason you (or whoever the author is) needed to hack their way to this page is because they are over-complicating and over-engineering their UI. This page is using a CSS grid, for no reason at all. It's pulling in webGL code to render a background that could be handled with a simple Canvas. None of the elements on the page are in the right order, so good heckin luck trying to read this if you're blind. Even though, to be clear, the information this page is displaying is an ordered list of animals with some text next to them. I have to be honest with you, and this is cruel. But when I design a page... I don't care for blind people. I don't focus my design so that it will cascade down into something blind people can read. Books don't have this property, movies don't and because of this... neither should web pages. It is not worth the effort. >I'm not sure I agree that the state of native apps is perfectly fine. And I definitely disagree that caring about stuff like accessibility necessarily means that you can't be creative, or that we'll be holding the web back. I think that 95% of the native apps on your computer are probably text based UIs, except they've got a little bit of styling applied on top of them to turn unordered lists into drop-down menus. We have escape hatches for the web apps that are more complicated, that genuinely need to do crazy pixel-level things. Most of them don't. I never said native apps are perfectly fine. I'm also not advocating all sites be designed with pixels. What I am advocating is freedom from HTML and CSS. If the platform of the browser exposed pixel level control with HTML and CSS only as a library and given the amount of people who hate the CSS + HTML... it's almost a guarantee that people will create sibling API's that are on the same High level as HTML + CSS but offering different philosophies. There are multitudes of UI layout languages and tools out there, who said HTML and CSS was the best, and why does it have to be the only way? That's all I'm saying. You expose pixel level control at the core for the purpose of being able to use and create multiple high level libraries rather being vendor locked into HTML and CSS.