The author's argument about SoC is not convincing. He: "is, in my polite opinion, completely wrong". The graybeards are right on this one.

For those of us who remember working with "DHTML" before libraries like jQuery proliferated, and then jQuery became ubiquitous for a few years - many of us recall the messes that the simplistic technique of using intrinsic events gave us.

When intrinsic events were introduced (e.g. the onclick attribute), they were meant to wire up some simple DOM behavior to Java Applets. Then somebody convinced the W3C people that it was a neat idea, and it needed to be in the HTML 4 spec.