In that regard, Free Republic is the gold standard of web design. There are times when circumstances are such that I have to use the lynx browser (a versatile but character UI application). FR is one of the few sites where navigation still works with ease. And of course, the simple, clean design renders just perfectly.
In my work, I'd love to present pages the FR-way. But, alas, our customers demand razzle dazzle so the code is littered with browser-specific if conditions for the Ajax, PHP and Perl components to work. I will admit that MSIE has improved over the years, with MSIE 10 and Firefox 22 no longer requiring different code execution paths at runtime.
Glad I am not the only person still using lynx browser.
Even have it set up on this Xubuntu Linux box. It goes directly to Drudge Report. Sure speeds up my reading process on that sight, without the page refresh issues that it has and all the garbage that goes with his site.
Lynx is really fast and stable. Simple works.