I saw a lot of people trying to avoid HTML in their websites in the past.
The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and links worked weirdly.
That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each page.
Oh yes, totally forgot about flash and `<map>`s – but one could argue even those were originally designed to solve the problems of 'vanilla' HTML. They of course failed and HTML kind of prevailed, but only by being coupled with a massive set of APIs on the Web Platform. If it wasn't for those JS APIs, we might be stuck with Flash forever.
The flash ones are the obvious example, but I once had the pleasure of an entire site that looked like any other, except it took forever to load and links worked weirdly.
That was because the entire site was an image map over a giant .bmp for each page.