While I dislike websites that are seemingly more mobile "friendly", being a subjective term. I would like flash to go away.

I don't blame touch devices, I blame bad design decisions. There is no excuse in this day and age for a site to not detect what kind of device is accessing it and put a page appropriate to the device. I'm a bit out of practice, but I think basic HTML in it's current iteration supports this.

If one is going to take a one page fits all approach, then I think the design should support the site without scripting so at least the layout looks good (you can still warn users they need to enable scripting if it's needed).

Basic HTML can't do much of anything (except inform the browser what kind of data a piece of data is supposed to be - unless the web designer/developer is an idiot who completely ignores the intended use for the tags and instead uses his own CSS classes and Javascript together with completely nonsensical markup - and nowadays it even has the option of saying "this is a video" and "this is an article" rather than just "this is a generic object you likely need a plugin for" and "this is a generic box (ie. div) with arbitrary text and markup, make of it what you will").

CSS (media queries, specifically), on the other hand, can offer different stylesheets depending on how the screen looks (height and/or width, portrait or landscape, colour depth, pixel density ...). 15 years ago, we could already detect whether it is a screen or not (well, depending on what the device reports), might be a printed page.

It's defined at the browser level. It determines which events fire, and in what order. Which doesn't mean there aren't situations where the OS has some say, but when you touch it tends to pause to see if there is a drag starting, then sets off a shotgun style blast of events including the click event which generally sends you off somewhere you don't want to go. That is unless the developer knows what all to trap and stop and in what way makes sense for that situation. Some devices (like iOS ones) have made some efforts to simulate desktop hover on the first touch but it's really a lawless, non-standardized mess. The one time I had to dig through it all made me hope I don't have to again. MS of all groups is trying to standardize it, and getting high marks for the proposed standard.

We'll see, but touch has more or less killed hover which sucks because it's very useful on the desktop. Though it was already discouraged for accessibility concerns for anyone interested in that deep dark hole.

Ok then, I guess I need to try out different Android browsers. Maybe I've actually used the Android default browsers less, and used Firefox or Opera instead.