…do you disable CSS?

My websites would fare a lot better unstyled than most websites built on top of frameworks like Bootstrap and their 'classy' HTML, but it's still not going to look good without CSS and no online business is going to make more money without CSS than with it.

I'm a big fan of terse, straightforward HTML, plus nice CSS on top of that. I've made (and get a lot of use out of) a basic.css stylesheet I built that supports a few basic themes: http://staticresource.com/basic-test.html

Let's see some of your HTML J_Darnley :)

I really like those themes. Academic work is often left untouched for decades, so there's definite value in simple pages that look good.

I don't see a license mentioned anywhere, though. Can I use that code on my sites?

Yeah, feel free - consider it under MIT.

Those themes (and more) are included under the 'Template Factory' project over on Github: https://github.com/tomhodgins/template-factory

That package contains more than just basic.css, but also includes three additional styles, and a bunch of simply written responsive CSS + JS plugins as well.

Not quite. I block javascript with NoScript. I block many third-party requests with RequestPolicy. I block webfonts with uBlock. I have disabled anti-aliasing/font smoothing (almost completely) in Windows.

Some websites make me glad Palemoon still has the View -> Page Style -> No Style option. I do admit a day may come when I do disable CSS once and for all.

Unfortunately browsers make it hard to actually disable CSS, you can disable it after page load but not before.

Well, by design (which sadly Chrome breaks) CSS prioritizes user styles: https://www.viget.com/articles/inline-styles-user-style-shee...

Unfortunately, as people write more and more convoluted html, and are using javascript techniques for laying out web pages and blogs, not just web applications -- it's becoming harder and harder to have the reading experience one wants, rather than the reading experience some designer fop thinks you should want -- for no good reason.

It started with Microsoft Frontpage setting the background to white without overriding the body text colour by default (so those that had a user stylsheet for reading white/light text on a dark background got zero contrast) -- and has been going steadily down hill from there.

Indeed you can! I have bookmarklets that will let you override this dastardly and unfortunately common bit of CSS:

http://alanhogan.com/bookmarklets#subpixel

(Note: my idiotic web host broke my SSL and this bookmarklet isn't working on HTTPS pages at present. I hope to fix this within the next month.)