The irony is you have to work to get this to not work. HTML by default will render just fine. Developers just can't resist customizing it so it doesn't work.
My web sites use plain HTML as much as possible. They're derided for being "Web 1.0", but they work, load in a flash, can be resized by the user, are legible, etc.
Even Apple went with pages that were light grey text on white with a tiny font. My eyeballs would just hurt trying to read it. This was a few years ago, maybe they fixed it, but I grew to avoid reading Apple's online docs because it was literally painful.
