Yeah, the question isn't whether styling per se is needed, but whether CSS as a language doubling HTML's old presentational attributes, yet in a thousand ad-hoc

Yeah, the question isn't whether styling per se is needed, but whether CSS as a language doubling HTML's old presentational attributes, yet in a thousand ad-hoc, unchecked syntaxes and layout models ever made sense at all. The author criticizes generators, but apart from those terrible mysql CMSs there's also SGML, on which HTML (and XML) is based, lending HTML authoring affordances such as text macros, shared fragments, templating, custom shortform syntax a la markdown, stylesheets, pipelines, outline generators, link decorators, with full type checking etc. etc. HTML feels incomplete without. The Thief reference, though, I don't get - is the point that mission briefs and picked up letters are using Times New Roman? It's a terrible screen font at small sizes, and also HN could do with a modest style upgrade to improve touchable areas/distances and support for prefers-color-scheme if only to hide you're browsing the orange site ;)