Note that this paragraph is not one of the "margin notes", but a quotation from the book they're reviewing. Their commentary disagrees: First, the specificatio

Note that this paragraph is not one of the "margin notes", but a quotation from the book they're reviewing. Their commentary disagrees: First, the specification can be called large, but hardly huge. It does not contain hundreds of elements, at least if the word "element" is taken in the sense that it is used in the specification. It is hardly true that very few people are expected to read it. The specification contains several introductory and tutorial parts - many of them rather good - which obviously imply that it was written for a wide audience. And the specification itself says, in its About the HTML 4.0 Specification part: > This document has been written with two types of readers in mind: authors and implementors. We hope the specification will provide authors with the tools they need to write efficient, attractive, and accessible documents, without over-exposing them to HTML's implementation details. And who says HTML was not intended to be writeable and readable by humans? There seems to a rumor that Tim Berners-Lee himself has said something like that, but if that's true, perhaps someone did not get the joke.