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Comment by codedokode | Hacker News Reader

That is because people who do HTML markup are usually not developers. They are either wannabe developers or just incompetent people hired to reduce costs. They would never waste their time on reading something complicated as W3C standards and understanding concepts like semantic markup.

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I'm curious about who read w3c standards, even on HN. I don't. Even MDN (which I consider as fork of w3c for humans) can be quite confusing so let's not judge people on this.

I don't think I've ever actually read the standards and I've been doing this 12 or so years now. I just kind of picked up on what was considered kosher and what wasn't over time. And then when having a "XHTML STRICT" badge in your footer was all the rage, I learned a bit more by having to tweak my code to earn it.

imo, there are a lot of different paths to being a good developer. Personally I find scouring over the standards or some dry reference site to be about the most painful way.

It is interesting that when XHTML was popular most people actually made and served HTML pages (with content type text/html) even if they had a XHTML doctype. That is why this standard was dead from the beginning. Though personally I like the idea of not displaying the page if there is any error in the code.

MDN is nice, but the W3C standards for HTML and CSS are actually pretty easy to read.

I did when I was a beginner developer and wanted to understand CSS better. MDN doesn't help much if you want to understand for example how element dimensions are calculated, and W3C has a detailed description [1]. I haven't seen a better explanation yet.

[1] https://www.w3.org/TR/CSS2/visudet.html#Computing_widths_and...

My experience has been quite opposite. In fact, most of the HTML I've worked on was written by developers whose primary focus is server-side Java.

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