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Sure, but 100% unstyled HTML was extremely rare even in the 90s. The problem with everyone writing their own crap HTML is that the sites become terrible and unusable, because they lack good design. What platforms like Twitter/FB initially did was just provide a unified, usable interface to a certain kind of information. Compare to MySpace, which collapsed partly because vast amounts of the profile pages were horrible.

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Browsers should (have) provide(d) good design by default — write simple <p>s and <hN>s and get beautiful presentation.

Yep. The original Bootstrap is a bug report against browsers - its defaults are what the browser should have been doing with unstyled pages all along.

I still (I’m in my twenties) remember building buttons and titles from images. Not really useable unless you are using the resolution the page was designed for, and don’t care about responsiveness or using a screen reader.

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