Whever font discussions come up on Hacker News, asking a question like that is risky, because a lot of people will (at least profess to) not only sincerely answer "yes" but be very, very insistent that web designers should not be able to even suggest the typeface that their pages use. When you press them on this point, at least a small subset of them will go on to explain why all design is bad and image support was probably a mistake.
Giving so-called designers a bunch of tools to make every web page behave differently and taking the design choices away from browser and platform vendors absolutely was a mistake and you can see it really clearly when you look at application design in the mid-1980s to mid-1990s versus the mid-1990s to now “designers get to do whatever they want” era of suck.
* I cannot, in good conscience, say that image support was a mistake. There is too much valuable work that cannot be expressed well in text and needs to be graphical. Ditto sound and video.
* Once you’ve added images, you need rich text. If it’s not there, people who insist on doing it anyway will fake it using pictures of text, which is simpler than proper rich text support, but also a lot worse because it doesn’t work with TTS, cannot be indexed for search, and doesn’t work with the clipboard.
The “pictures of text” problem is not just professional designers justifying their paychecks. They’re all over the place on Twitter and Facebook, because of the poor text formatting options they provide.
I don’t think image, video, or audio support was a mistake. I think CSS and JavaScript and cookies and referers were.
The web had rich text even before it had images, in the form of emphasis and strong emphasis, as well as a variety of other forms of semantic markup to indicate document structure and relationships.
What I’m saying is that if a web page doesn’t work on NCSA Mosaic from 1994—modulo modern crypto and character sets—it is doing something very wrong.
I don’t care that this represents a large proportion of the web today, that doesn’t make it any less wrong.
When you say that, what I hear is: "When tools offer greater flexibility, some people will use them in bad ways. Therefore, no one should have access to those tools."
There are plenty of tools for getting exact matched to a design, PDF for example. That’s not what the web is for and every attempt to cram it into that role has just made it worse.
Just because you can pound nails with a screwdriver doesn’t mean we should just start catering to people who want to do that. Or people who want to use knives as screwdrivers. Etc.
