Without that general principle the internet would never have got working. Even now, "standards" shift, and it's important that older sites don't simply stop working because of things that were once perfectly valid becoming slightly out-of-fashion.

Complexity is like a dead cat under the carpet. You can push it around all you like, but it will still be there, and someone still needs to deal with it.

It's just a shame that after a while it starts to smell, and the smell is hard to get rid of.

But we moved all this complexity into browsers. So only the few browser manufacturers are in need of highly skilled devs and the rest of the world can stick with "us" ;)

Others like using empty trs for spacing is just old-school HTML wrangling. Could it be improved? Sure. Does it actually matter? Only barely.

Many of the errors are dupes; if you roll them up there are significantly fewer "errors". Which makes sense, because the HTML on HN is trivial to begin with, by design.

What was the point, even?

It obviously works.

Plus, let's ignore the whole "we only learned HTML in 1995 and never looked modern practices again" thing too because, well, it still works. Sometimes it's worth spending 5 hours making something just work using what you know instead of spending 500 hours making something ideologically pure.