Indeed. I have used Adblock and Noscript for years.

My browsing the web is not an invitation for websites to serve a webpage viewing webapp so that they can (poorly, buggily, in a more error-prone manner) reimplement a browser's navigation logic. (Ever had to reload a website which uses the pushState API because you clicked a link and for whatever reason the XMLHTTPRequest it made to fetch the page didn't work and it just hung and ignored all future link clicks? Dear chickenshit webdevs, if you think you can implement navigation better than an actual web browser, you're probably wrong.)

The vast majority of the time when I come to an article which is a blank page without JavaScript, I don't enable JavaScript; I just make a mental note that the web developers are beyond incompetence and move on.

I'm starting to respond to this trend with a more aggressive refusenik approach. For example, CSS is now so powerful that you can cause excessive CPU load with it alone. So I now have a shortcut configured to disable CSS for a site. This also makes many sites readable which otherwise wouldn't be, because they're doing something insane like blanking out content with CSS under the expectation that it'll be shown using JavaScript. And of course all of these recent 'ad-blocker-blockers' (http://youtu.be/Iw3G80bplTg) seem to rely on JavaScript.

Sometimes the content is loaded via JavaScript and so this won't work. Amazingly, for some years now there is a Blogger template which does this, which demonstrates that this brain-damaged approach has spread even to Google. But the greatest irony is that you can work around these sites, quite often, using the Google cached copy. Googlebot has supported JavaScript for some time (actually sort of unfortunate, in the sense that it removes an incentive for webdevs to design sites sanely), and it appears that cached copies are now some sort of DOM dump. Which has the hilarious consequence that you can now use Google to fix broken Google web design. There are *.blogspot.com sites which are blank pages, but the cached version is readable.

My own weblog is very spartan, being rather of the motherfuckingwebsite.com school of non-design. bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com was linked below, but I don't think I agree with it. Ultimately, in terms of the original vision of the hypertext web, I'm not sure web designers should be dictating the rendering of their websites at all; that is, I'm not sure web designers should exist.

So basically, imagine surfing the web with CSS disabled, but for your own user styles, that format absolutely all content the way you like it. Your own personal typographic practices are unilaterally adopted. bettermotherfuckingwebsite.com might be right as regards to typographic excellence, but it's wrong about where those decisions should be made.

Unfortunately it's undeniable that this is a lost battle. Browsers used to let you choose default background, foreground and link colours, as well as fonts, font sizes, etc. I think you can still choose default fonts. But the idea of the web browser as providing a user-controlled rendering of semantic, designless text is long abandoned. That ship died with XHTML2 - I think I'm about the only person who mourned its cancellation.