We had that, it was called gopher. We didn't like it then, why would we suddenly want it now? It's not as if design, from typefaces to colors to everything else, does not complement the content.

If anything, the kind of non-design you seem to want is a regression to even before not just the web, but writing itself. Graphical elements, colors and design touches were part of the written word since before Gutenberg (from the ancient egyptian hieroglyphics, to the arabic ornamental manuscripts to the elaborate scrolls of the middle ages, to William Morris).

As for the advice about using a grid, that should definitely have been accompanied with the caveat that your design should still flow to the browser's width. Fixed-width web pages are _evil_, where by evil I actually mean _stupid_.

I'm not sure. Fixed-width is better for human consumption for several reasons, not just because books and magazines are fixed width. For one, we like to read a number of words on each line, not everything that fits in a huge horizontal lines of text in a 30" monitor. Second, we like the text we are reading to have some proportional relationship with the figures, images etc that come with it -and those images are fixed-width. Catering to multiple widths is less of an ideal, and more of a pragmatic necessary evil due to varying computer screens. Let's not make a virtue out of necessity.