Serious question because I am not a web developer at all, is it possible to make a website that looks decent with just raw HTML? And not have it look like this or like it's from 1999.
I think that depends on what you mean by "decent." If you exclude css entirely, you're left with tables for complex layouts, basic colors (font color, border color, etc) and imagemaps. Not terribly exciting but not necessarily ugly either.
Only by creating pages as if it was 1999 (but with better taste). Removing all styling functionality from HTML in favor of using HTML for structure only and CSS for styling has been an explicit goal over the last decade.
