But the default is objectively awful, at least in Chrome. Seriously: no margins on the images and the images all different widths. No human being would lay out

But the default is objectively awful, at least in Chrome. Seriously: no margins on the images and the images all different widths. No human being would lay out a mixed-media document like this on purpose if they expected other human beings to consume it easily. (This reflects not so much on the author as on how fascinatingly bad the UX of unstyled HTML is. I remember when things looked like this and we were just used to it because there wasn't anything else on the web).