[lapcat]

I think the author's examples/analogies are strange and don't really fit with or support the author's point:

> The Wright brothers achieved flight before fully understanding the physics behind the airfoil,

> James Dyson learned what makes a great double cyclone vacuum only after building them,

> The bicycle was invented without an understanding of the mechanisms which maintain its balance.

The principles in question are physical, immutable laws of nature, and they are in fact the cause of success, not the byproduct of success. You can be ignorant of physics, but you can't ignore it, otherwise you'll end up injured or dead.

On the other hand, the principles of HTML semantics were just an invention of Tim Berners-Lee, not God. There's nothing stopping you from ignoring those principles. This follows from the quoted tweet: "they are often disregarded by developers and tools when producing markup and styling".

[wolverine876]

Also, it's cherry-picking. They didn't know everything (the nature of cutting-edge R&D), but they knew plenty.