Re: This is a human shop, for human people!
One of the advantages of Perl is that you can server-side configure an HTML page to suit the browser. Efficient downloads - and potentially free of Javascript.
Sorry, not going to bring back user-agent sniffing for _everything_ unless I really absolutely must, and only for a few things. It's 2018, not 1994.
We do something like it for our CSS (we serve different CSS to different browsers, to ensure you don't end up downloading too much CSS which is completely useless to your browser), mind you.
We do some similar tricks for supporting HTML5 for IE8 (so as not to burden most users with loading things like html5shiv) but we've got to draw the line somewhere between "let's fix the rendering for those few silly browsers" and "let's make our HTML templates a huuuuge chunk of IF/ELSE/ELSIF based on which flavour of the year browser they are". Macros can help, sure, but that's not the point.
Feature detection / progressive enhancement is where things are at, and we can't "just" use HTML+CSS for _everything_. For some things, we require JS. They keep things tidy and sane for us, and they hardly change much for most users.
Not all users run with ad blockers, noscript, images disabled, etc. etc. There wouldn't be a site at all if that were the case.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
