I still maintain that the only (not the "best", but the only) way to really learn something - even something technical - is to understand its history and unders

I still maintain that the only (not the "best", but the only) way to really learn something - even something technical - is to understand its history and understand how it got to be the way it is. Everything starts out about as simple as you expect it would be - probably the way you or I or anybody else would put it together if we didn't have any guidelines to work off of, and ends up being refined a bit at a time as more surprises are discovered. The problem is, what you end up with - like modern CSS - just don't make a lot of sense unless you understand what problems the current versions were refined to work around.