I mostly agree with you. The web itself is wholly incorrectly designed, or should I say evolved incorrectly. Instead of generic content that gets modified to individual users preference, we have the inverse, every site has some special functionality/code and therefore needs a web designer. This is not only increasing complexity, but also cost. With generic web, anyone could make a web page, no coding required, and anyone could read it. You can see that there is actual demand for this, as there are emerging solutions out there that try to solve it. Unfortunately they are solving it the only way possible, by using the current web standards of building stuff on top of more stuff.
Generic standards are the standards of the web. You don't need to use css. You can use semantic tags. It looks very bland, as it must, since no specific design thought has gone into it.
But this will never suffice for companies that have a marketing budget. They need to promote their brand more than they need to distribute information. It's not the web's fault. And any scheme you come up with is going to suffer the same fate.
Using generic tags and allowing clients to specify presentation is pretty much precisely where I'm headed.
For an excellent example of the first half of this, see Mark Pilgrim's excellent "Dive into HTML5". I'm referring here to the structure of the document, not the content (though that's also excellent). The document is virtually entirely bare-bones HTML5 tags, with a typical nesting depth of 2-3 elements, rarely more.
Mark has also applied an excellent (and being the exception, proving the rule that virtually all CSS sucks) stylesheet to the site. Again with a minimum of chrome and glitter.
My thought, again, is that, similar to how LaTeX offers a few basic documenbt templates, a set of standardised site semantic layouts, for which clients offer standard presentation formats, with variants for high and low contrast, "night mode", and simplified design, might be preferable.
