It's interesting that you provide movie posters as an example. That's literally advertising. At some point the web evolved from being a simple text-based document format to becoming animated, linkable magazines and an endless barrage of advertising. It evolved to look pretty to entertain and entice people, not to inform them.

> Nobody dumps a plaintext unformatted version of a book or research paper expecting you to format it yourself.

Have you read a novel? It's just text in paragraphs.

> Nobody should be expected to produce web sites that are just content.

I think you're taking an extreme viewpoint. Have a look at all the markdown on GitHub. Clearly markdown is great for a lot of content. It isn't great for a lot of marketing.

You're taking the extreme view that I mentioned an ad and that invalidated the rest of the examples. Try not cherry picking?

>Have you read a novel? It's just text in paragraphs.

I take offense to this attack. Have _you_ ever opened a novel?

Typesetting matters a whole lot. Go convert an novel's .epub to .txt and ditch all of the fancy design, read it start to finish and tell me it's the same quality of experience. It isn't and you know it isn't. Hell, even different size prints of the same book are differently enjoyable. Your rants about ads do not invalidate the merits of design.