I'm not quite sure what you mean by "it should tell us something." So, I apologize in advance if the following is a misunderstanding. (For the record, I don't much care about someone's HTML per se. I'm talking about presentation. I'm not being a web standards fanatic, if that's what you meant.)
If you mean that they are all substance and no frills and that that's a good thing (or something along those lines), I would argue that presentation matters. You don't have to follow the latest fashions, but Crockford's site makes it literally hard to read his (excellent) articles. There are no margins. The line spacing is painful. Applying Readability to that page makes the article not just prettier but more substantive (because I can draw the meaning from it more easily).
Giving literally zero thought to the visuals of a webpage is comparable to giving literally zero thought to the order of a presentation or paper. All writing is partly about communicating, and giving no thought to such things is not cool and intellectual. It's likely to be lazy or pretentious.
(One of Giles Bowkett's posts about this page makes an interesting comparison of the visual layout of Hacker News versus that of the Guardian. Found the post: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news.... The bit that struck me is this:
> If you are a geek, you are probably consuming information in a less sophisticated structure then your non-geek peers.
I think there's some truth to that, especially in this case.)
The line spacing is the default one presented by your browser; if you find fault with the line-spacing, you're finding fault with your browser preferences.
And margins are generally no good. Depending on how they're effected, what margins do is perhaps make the page more attractive for those running their browser at fullscreen, while screwing over everyone doing the appropriate thing, which is to keep the window opened at the user's desired size for reading. This is because they are either implemented as a) a centered, fixed-width column that invokes horizontal scroll bars for those whose preferred size is smaller than required by the layout (usually no less than 850 pixels these days), or b) fixed margins so that, e.g., a 640 pixel wide viewport on a page with 200+ pixel margins reduces the effective column width to less than 250 pixels.
As for pretension, I agree, although it doesn't originate from the likes of Crockford, but instead those uncompromising fucks who find their "artistic vision" for a website to be of greater importance than their employers' content.
If you mean that they are all substance and no frills and that that's a good thing (or something along those lines), I would argue that presentation matters. You don't have to follow the latest fashions, but Crockford's site makes it literally hard to read his (excellent) articles. There are no margins. The line spacing is painful. Applying Readability to that page makes the article not just prettier but more substantive (because I can draw the meaning from it more easily).
Giving literally zero thought to the visuals of a webpage is comparable to giving literally zero thought to the order of a presentation or paper. All writing is partly about communicating, and giving no thought to such things is not cool and intellectual. It's likely to be lazy or pretentious.
(One of Giles Bowkett's posts about this page makes an interesting comparison of the visual layout of Hacker News versus that of the Guardian. Found the post: http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2009/04/miniapp-hacker-news.... The bit that struck me is this:
> If you are a geek, you are probably consuming information in a less sophisticated structure then your non-geek peers.
I think there's some truth to that, especially in this case.)