[uniqueid]

    > There is absolutely no reason great 
    > typography should come at the expense of privacy

I agree to the extent that there is an order of magnitude less reason to prohibit CSS than Javascript.

However CSS is not benign. There are features that bad actors regularly exploit. For example, setting the opacity of an evil button to 0, and positioning it above an innocent button.

Also, CSS, as currently designed, is a barrier to reuse. The model I like is one where users are at liberty to display web content however they (the user, not the website) prefer. Since CSS is basically reusable only in theory, it inhibits that.

    > I am happy that I don't have to read source code in 
    > Courier just because it is the only available monospace font. 

It's true that, as a web developer, you can provide Courier. As a user, it's not, by browser default, your choice whether you get Courier. If the server decides a user should see Comic Sans, that's what the client will use, no?

[tomjen3]

CSS is literally designed so that you can override previous definitions by loading your own stylesheet. Thats not just the standard, it is in the name (Cascading Style Sheet). The fact that no main-stream browser supports adding user specific styles out of the box is an issue with the browsers not acting as the user agents they are supposed to be and not really CSS.

[uniqueid]

CSS is reusable in some ways, but not in the sense that you can take a stylesheet from one site, apply it to another, and have a guarantee that the result will make sense.

This is partly because HTML has its own competing presentation features, and partly because there is an infinite number of cases for which a designer would have to write rules (eg: many html elements, that can also be nested)