CSS on its own isn't necessarily bad, but requiring it to not have an intentionally broken web page is. Additionally, forced style choices implemented through CSS and HTML tags such as <font> or attributes such as bgcolor, color, link, vlink, and alink, were afterthoughts. The addition of these would give way to ideas and misfeatures used by so-called "web designers" who wanted everyone to see materials with the mindset that everyone uses the same web browser on the same screen size with the same operating system and fonts installed.
For example, a web "designer" implements CSS code to make all paragraph tags sized at default 16 pixels, along with the text color to default black. The font face is set to Tahoma with a fallback to sans-serif. The page goes live, and several years later, perse finds two typos in the same word: sans-serif was written as "sans sref", and the page now used the browser default font on machines running BSD, GNU/Linux, Mac OS or anything else -- which was ultimately not the intended way it was supposed to look. This nonhypothetical example, which happened to me around 2015, can happen to anyone. (It also shows the importance of spellcheckers.) Unless a "designer" has multiple platforms and browsers to test on, it will be easy for per to miss numerous design flaws.
But as the ability to create more and more complex designs became possible, so did the risk of error and overcomplexity. In 2020, I found myself big into web "designing". Complexity was not too hard, especially with the existence of so-called "frameworks", many of which also have moral and ethical implications to them. Often times, "modern" web sites will require the "designer" to hand visitor data over to a massive company running a series of servers to try and give faster speeds for loading the many scripts and styling codes needed, or visitors will be forced to run nonfree software with no alternatives or replacements. The University of Akron, for example, solidified its nonfree software stance when switching everyone to nonfree Google and then Microsoft platforms, which require you to use nonfree JavaScript to simply log in to your account. It also can slow computers down a lot sometimes.
For most day-to-day tasks, the computer I typically use is not at all "modern", and I am far from alone with this. Everyone has their own reasons for using older technologies, and my are detailed in "Computing Info". The laptop works fine for the time being, but several older computers I have and still use from time to time struggle to use "modern" JavaScript-heavy web sites. A good example of a "modern" web site that too many people rely on is Google Docs. It worked on the older computer sometimes, but the page will freeze every so often, such as when it tries to save to Google's servers. And to add additional insult to injury: the changes simply did not save most of the time since the page crashed. Google Docs has the issues of being both nonfree software and Service as a Software Substitute as well, which worsens the now ultimately unfixable bloat issues. This is more of an issue that plagues so-called "web applications" more so than normal web sites. Normal personal home pages, for example, do not suffer from this problem.
Plain HTML pages are beneficial, as they can load fast due to being lightweight, can properly fit many screen sizes, look relatively the same across web browsers, are very accessible to anyone that visited your page, are great at getting points across, and can work well with screen readers, text-based web browsers, printers, and so on.
Does this mean everything is in .html files, and there are no server-side scripts? No. I have some server-side scripts on my machine. I've written various perl and php scripts, and contributed to other server-side perl scripts. I simply don't rely on it for the place it is not necessary, such as this article. If I wanted to, I could generate my web pages with static web site generator scripts. In the case of web sites edited or authored by several people, we could use a web site revision system for it.
With all of the above having been said: this is, in fact, a "proper web site/page". You do not need to have tons of over-bloat, many unnecessary scripts, and the digital equivalent to the horrible burn-out-your-retina blue LED lights everywhere and anywhere in order to have a good web site. Perhaps it's for the better I found out the truth sooner than later.
Other pages will include symbols on them, such as the Chell Aperture server.
And here is an example where I use align=right to float the
image of some wild berries over to the right side of the page. All of
this was done without unnecessary complexity and bloat, and without
scripts to do the work for the web browser, that the web browser will
still need to do on its own.
Below is an example of a table that I used on the FreeBSD-based Coco server:
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Normally when I used this method, borders were off. They are enabled above as a part of the demonstration only. Here is the sample table with the optional borders disabled:
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Optionally, you can just not use a table to position the images, as seen with the apertures and berries.
If the state of the so-called "modern" web was not bad enough, it has already gotten to the point that we are creating workarounds rather than fixing the problem itself. In terms of workarounds, the digital equivalent of using a Band-Aid® on an avulsion will become a thing sooner than later. But it's all good, since this is "modern", and people's short attention spans will not be able to handle reading a few paragraphs of text.
Images can be good when used in ways that make sense. When used for nonsense, as text substitutes, for "tracker" substitutes, or other similar concepts, then they are bad and the page is better off without them. For more information on images gone bad, see the FTC's article regarding tracking pixels and what they found from medical treatment companies using them in inappropriate places. However, images are not exactly usable with screen readers or text-based web browsers, but this is what the alt tags can fix, if necessary.
Just because Mozilla creates Firefox, and it's not either Google Chrome (includes Brave and Edge, which are only Chrome clones and nothing else) or Microsoft Internet Explorer, that doesn't make them good. Consider using GNU IceCat instead, or if you don't want graphical at all, see Lynx (linked below).