OK fair enough. But bad programming by browser makers has nothing to do with the markup used for web-pages, which is what you were praising with BH's homepage.

OK fair enough. But bad programming by browser makers has nothing to do with the markup used for web-pages, which is what you were praising with BH's homepage. Quirks mode also has nothing to do with markup and everything to do with browser makers' failure to implement w3c css standards. And wasn't the DOM developed to accommodate demands for client side scripting such as javascript. So two of the things you cite as contributing to bloat have nothing to do with page design, and without the third (the DOM) we'd give up a lot of client-side scripting functionality, which is exactly the functionality I am arguing isn't worth giving up.