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Those specs need to be extremely detailed to ensure interoperability. Earlier versions of the HTML specs were much more readable, but unfortunately lead to interoparability issues.



With full appreciation of all the complexities and intricacies involved here, the state of these official documentation resources as they exist today isn't great.

Additionally, most initiatives aimed at improving the situation have only resulted in yet more overhead in the form of additional committees with each their own agendas and procedures, or the creation of another new deeply interconnected but otherwise completely separate sibling standard[0][1][3][4], fragmenting things even further.

I used to be quite heavily involved with some of the more meritful of those initiatives, but at some point realised that despite all the time and effort I was putting in, nothing really meaningful/impactful had been achieved or was even anywhere in sight, and it was also becoming too costly on a personal level. Guess that's my justification for having the right to post this rant :)

[0] https://infra.spec.whatwg.org/

[1] https://webidl.spec.whatwg.org/

[2] https://w3c.github.io/html-aam/

[4] https://w3c.github.io/html-aria/


Someone put it like this recently: the audience for specs is browser vendors, and the audience for MDN is web developers; ideally, you shouldn't have to go to the specs if MDN describes the features well enough to get your application running or your problem solved. MDN docs consider the practical aspect of how application developers will use features or why they should care, so there is a need to keep the content accessible in as many ways as possible.




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