too much of (modern) web design is about control — controlling how the user interacts with your website, how they view it and use it, when it really should be about guidance. you can lead a horse to water etc.
on the other hand, there is design as expression, especially on personal websites, and i definitely don't blame anyone who wants their site to suit their personality. it's a lot of fun. larger, corporate web design trends shouldn't be conflated with individual hobbyists' choices.
the designer's main role is to facilitate the delivery of information. that doesn't have to be textual, and obfuscation and maze-like interfaces can be part of the message itself. the bread and butter of the web is straighforward text and image though, and you don't need much to make that more readable! here's the css for this page:
body {
background: #aaa;
color: #111;
max-width: 800px;
margin: 0 auto;
padding: 0.5em;
font: 1.1rem/1.5 sans-serif;
}
and that's just reducing contrast a tad and making the lines shorter to make reading more comfortable. i'm being more spartan than usual on purpose — my default style.css is fancier (longer, prettier, deals with more elements like images etc, has alternate light/dark palettes to try and give you, the reader, a little bit of choice over the brightness of your webpages) although still fairly basic) — but i guess the core of what i'm trying to say is that presenting text in a webpage is typesetting.
in a different world, the user would be able to easily set their ideal global webpage css while the standard would be to serve raw html. this way, the user tailors the web to receive information in whatever way's more comfortable for them, and additional styling can be used for specific needs, like web art, to illustrate a point, and so on — and probably be opt-in, rather than opt-out.
style and presentation are also information, and not always actually necessary. see protocols like gopher and gemini, which are doing just fine by relinquishing control.
much like when i talked about this in the past (marrow #1), i'm not too sure how to end this. i was just outlining these ideas last night, and then youtube changed its design (again) today into the most hideous thing i've ever seen and well. i'm just tired. google can at any time decide, on a whim, that sharp square corners are dangerous (why, i could poke out my eye!) and i need to be whisked away into the hideous land of rounded corners as far as the eye can see. and what for? and yes i am aware of invidious and user styles and the dark reader extension but i shouldn't have to be! using the web shouldn't be filled with all these workarounds to be marginally useable. i'm tired.