[jdthomas]

Completely agree, just to add a few of my points...

Designers are also ruining the web because they are removing choice in how I view content.

HTML pages used to be designed such that they were a standard markup language. Thus I could change the settings of my browser if I preferred a dark background with light text. Now in the land of everything is a DIV and CSS is used to recreate the markup language, this is no longer possible -- at least not in a generic way. Not to mention it breaks browsing in a completely cross platform way (lynx, small screened devices, screen readers, etc.); you designer, will always forget at least one. And don't get me started on sites that do not load the content without javascript.

My preference would be that designers accepted the constraints of HTML. They are more than welcome to use CSS to offer my browser suggestions to how it should be rendered, but as the viewer, the final choice would be to me. If you MUST make the layout fit some exact format, switch to PDF (or similar) and don't pretend to be HTML.

I kind of feel like in the '90s, we screwed ourselves by having ugly defaults in the browsers. If no-CSS HTML files rendered more beautifully, maybe we would've avoided this mess.