You know - at one time we built plenty of websites - and in some cases applications - using little to no javascript (either it didn't exist, or it was only used for very minimal things) or any CSS (it didn't exist).
So what could we do today? That is - if we purposefully limited ourselves to just basic HTML, and server-side processing, without any (or minimal) CSS or javascript, and only using the (expanded) tag and attribute HTML we have today?
I don't know for sure - but I believe we could create some amazing things.
Think about it this way: Look at what demoscene people are able to create when they put extremely artificial challenges in front of themselves; we could try to do the same - and see what happens?
Perhaps there needs to be a demoscene-like competition space for this kind of stuff (how much can you get done in under 100k browser-side? 10k? 1k? Limit bandwidth to the backend, too, and maybe server-side size of code?).
Just some random thoughts - it might be something I'd have to try myself, but maybe this post might inspire someone to do it as well...