Two times now have I let AI loose on trying to implement a more advanced web browser for Skiff. Two times have I aborted the attempts and made do with the very basic one I've already got. The one that doesn't even attempt to understand CSS. The most recent attempt got passing grades for the old acid tests (acid1 and acid2) as well as implementing basic flexbox and grid support. Still both times I've just come away with the same conclusion. Just ignoring CSS and doing a reader mode pass of the document yields much more readable results than a poor mans CSS-aware browser.
Another issue is naively parsing and adhering to CSS rules quickly slows the browser down compared to the excellent speed I'm used to by cheating and ignoring CSS. And lastly I never intended to implement JS anyway so the end result would probably have been not very usable for many of the pages where CSS support would have made a difference.
It's too bad that the web developer mantra was mobile first instead of lynx first. Imagine if all pages degraded nicely for text only browser without CSS and JavaScript support. That would have been awesome. I will try to lead by example and make sure my future web projects do display properly in text only browsers. Please join me in this effort to make the web better for all!