To follow CSS Standards or not that is the question?

While stripping out elements from different websites I noticed the majority of them became disorganized and cryptic looking is this a problem since we normally see all the pieces of a website together?

I began with the two cruise sites I choose to discuss- Louis Cruises and Sikurimi. To my amazement Sikurimi looked better without it’s CSS style, images and colors. While Louis Cruises was chaotic when I took away the CSS style. When I removed the images from the site it appeared as a hollow shell and without the colors there is no characteristics to the site.

I was curious about what would happen with major sites I visit such as Target, Mashable and Gmail I began to pull them apart to see what would happen. I found that all of the sites I find visually appealing and functional become empty and useless when their elements are stripped away. I noticed that color, layout and images do help structure a website and complete the message. Without color I notice websites to be flat and unattractive to look at. The text just appears on the page with no life unless it is bold, italic, or a different size. When the CSS style is stripped away the sites fall out of their current layouts into paragraphs or lists of words that a viewer has to interpret for them with no visual aid. Finally the removal of images left holes in the websites creating them to look skeleton like.

While it is nice that Zen Garden can withstand having all of its elements stripped and still read the same, I do not think that the standard CSS works for all sites. The elements being stripped away from the sites in this exercise shape their websites and help make the sites appeal to their audience. If all sites followed the standard CSS the only changes would be the background image, color and concept the main layout of the sites would all be similar which could be boring.