ugh why do all plaintext browsers barely support styling?

@minekpo1 what kind of styling? CSS?

@getimiskon yeah , it seems like lynx and w3m only support changing the color of text and dont support any options that have anything to do with positioning :(

@minekpo1 you should check my website on those web browsers

@minekpo1 if you want some more styling on these browsers, you probably need to use stuff like tables, <center> and some other stuff that people will tell you they're obsolete.

@getimiskon yeah the issue is that

a) I don't want to chose between supporting modern browsers (which are better served by using modern features)
b) I would have to rewrite my enitre website to offer a slightly better experience on those browsers
c) there is no way (that I am aware of) to change how a website is displayed to accommodate text based browsers better
d) even with your website being designed for text based browsers, both w3m and lynx support different parts of your site (I have w3m-img explicitly installed but it doesn't display images anyway edit: managed to get it working, why is it so hard for text based browser developers to detect the capabilities of the terminal being used, I tried links with graphics support but that only displays images (or like color nevermind I had to explicitly enable color but it barely does anything) outside of a terminal), and none are limited by what my terminal can display, or even what just a A‌NSI enabled terminal can display (none actually do the rainbow text)
e) using alt text which is actually useful and not just one to three words makes buttons look horrible , but there is pretty much nothing I can do that wouldn't possibly make the experience worse for users who are not using text based browsers
f) I'm sorry but <center> and tables are obsolete, they are way more annoying to use than css , have less features and make it impossible to improve the styling of a website on some unique environment without changing things on different environments.

A handful of key features

[...]
No CSS; just basic HTML 4.0 rendering, including tables

that's not a feature , especially ironic as you are using css

All HTML entities rendered via ASCII and Unicode

yeah except all the new elements like <details>

to be fair, I don't think <details> is in HTML 4, but like, just because its new doesn't mean its bad

@minekpo1 tbf HTML4 is ancient and doesn’t have those

@lunareclipse I would guess <hr/> is in HTML 4 yet it doesnt seem to be supported either my bad, I misremembered how my site looks

@minekpo1 ok, here's my point:
a) if you want to support every browser, you need to stick to the basics, as HTML is backwards compatible
b) it really depends on what you're targeting, you don't necessarily have to rewrite your website. But make sure it is accessible, that's what matters.
c) only by using old plain HTML stuff (i'll explain later)
d) my website isn't specifically designed for those browsers, it's more like trying to make it look nice on as many browsers as possible. That requires the use of both modern and obsolete stuff, in order to make things look nice, but still there are stuff that are hit-or-miss, like images. Personally i test my website mostly on Pale Moon (which is my main browser), but also on Links (both in graphical and text mode) and on Dillo. So far i haven't noticed any issues there. Maybe it's because of my setup in some cases.
e) Alt text is important, so yeah, long alt text doesn't look that nice. But the thing is that lots of people who use text browsers, probably don't care about the looks that much.
f) I know that <center> and tables are obsolete, but if you want to design around browsers that don't support CSS, you probably have to do it. That's why i use both CSS and these old stuff. Also, I don't like centering images with CSS, it's unnecessarily a pain in the ass.

@getimiskon The thing is that my website can be accessed with lynx, w3m or whatever but those browsers have a superiority complex around not supporting features that aren't from more than two decades ago. I'm sorry but I'm not gonna spend a disproportionate amount of effort to support a marginal userbase if that requires me to rewrite pretty much everything. I don't like how modern websites use javascript and antipatterns, but I want my website to look decent without creating five nested tables.

@minekpo1 yeah, you don't have to go that far unless you really want to