This is a great example of the "medium.com Style": a grandiose claim with no factual back up. It's getting a little tiresome. I suspect there are some good things written on the site, but if this is the standard then it's no different from 'random guy X's blog' except it all looks the same.
And, also, what does that sentence mean? HTML already is standard.
Like at least some other recent articles, I have to assume that most of us already know (or at least have our own opinions, which are only half likely to match up and unlikely to be changed by articles like this). In which case this is not for tech people, but ancillary staff that like to think they're tech people (...VC's? PM's?).
I'm not sure why these keep getting upvoted.
And there's no good reason for the difference; if I have nice CSS for a login form, adapting the HTML to use the CSS or adapting the CSS to match the HTML is just busywork.
The widespread adoption of bootstrap means that a lot of sites now have inputs wrapped with div.control-group and btn classes on their buttons, etc. So I can take the CSS from site A and apply it to site B without changing the HTML.
That's what he means by "standard HTML".
This is a great example of the "news.yc style": a contrarian top comment with zero additional content. It's getting a little tiresome. I suspect there are some good comments written on the site, but if this is the standard then it's no different from 'valleywag' except it's a little more distributed.
And, also, what does that comment contribute? We already hate everything.