Altivo

The thing is, the corporations, both software sellers and web site advertisers, have been the driving force behind web site bloat and code inflation, just so they could make their advertising look like magazine pages or worse yet, television ads. The software developers have caved to demands in a willy-nilly fashion rather than creating sensible standards and following them. Microsoft, on top of the rest, is guilty of creating its own rules and ignoring standards, believing that such behavior perpetuates some mythical marketing edge. (IBM used to do the same thing, lot of good it did them in the long run.)

Pretty web pages are OK. Bloated web pages suck. I bail out rather than wait for them to load. Flash is the worst of all, yet more and more web developers are relying on it exclusively. Java and Javascript are largely unnecessary and should be kept to specific complex uses, like corporate intranets with interactive databases and such.

I agree about smart text editors. My current favorite is kate, which comes with the KDE desktop environment on Linux. I don't use KDE, but I do use kate. It does limited parsing and error correction, and knows the punctuation rules and basic structure of many languages, including HTML, CSS, and XML, so it catches mismatched parentheses and so forth and colors parameter names, values, and such in different ways to highlight them for you.

CSS is good for bringing the look of a group of web pages into sync. It also helps you maintain style on pages that are altered frequently. I don't really object to it, except that the syntax is already bloated due to the demands of users who insist on treating the web as a desktop publishing environment, which it decidedly is not. And in general, the guidebooks, tutorials, and online documentation for CSS are very, very poor. (See my reply to hellmutt on that.)