[bjoli]

I find it rather baffling that people don't seem to spend any time reading specs. I haven't done anything even remotely serious in HTML since about 2003, and I know about (and have used) the dir attribute.

it is one of maybe 12 global non-event attributes.

[spixy]

I learned HTML when I was young and hated reading specs.

Later then I just had no reason to read specs, HTML I wrote usually worked. And when not, there was google.