Comment by blackqueeriroh

He has apparently been involved in web technologies since… after i got involved with web technologies. I made my first website in 2003.

Which naturally makes me an authority on the matter. I may have been in middle school but i guess sheer years of involvement are all that counts, right?

EDIT: more to the point, briefly.

Whatever his past successes (or failures), this is decidedly a website which tries to pass itself off as something it is not. If you want to collate information to have a centralized guide, you can do that, just don't name it deceptively.

A specification is a very concrete thing, including in the world of web standards, and someone who's been involved with Wordpress of all things for over two decades should know better than to try and launder the term.

His contributions to Wordpress do not inspire confidence. While WP SEO was no doubt popular (the numbers seem to back it up), SEO had always been a very handwavy thing, and the industry was always full of people willing to profit off that.

To be clear, while I am not accusing de Valk of being such a profiteer, I am staunchly of the opinion that success in the SEO space is not a strong predictor of that person's expertise in any other area of web technology.

To wit, on his past: he appears, per Wikipedia, to have been involved with a site at css3.info. A skim of his author page (/author/admin/) shows that this site had a similar goal, if narrower scope, to the site linked in the HN post we're currently discussing. It was a bad idea then, and it was a bad idea now, and I write this with the knowledge that at least one other contributor to css3[dot]info claims to have been a member of the W3C's CSS3 WG.

And finally, on his Wikipedia page: this is an... unusual page.

- While there's strong off-wiki evidence that he has a presence outside of Wordpress (notably, as a VC), his wiki page focuses almost exclusively on his SEO plugin and the company he built around it.

- By biographical article standards, the article is strange. It focuses much more on a single product than the life of the person being documented, and the vast majority of the article is unequivocally positive. Neither of these are outright indicators of any malfeasance, but are both unusual.

- The principal source for information outside of his career is a Business Insider interview with him which is, again, outstandingly flattering (though nominally informative). The article in effect follows his own description of his life without framing it as such. This is, at a minimum, sloppy writing for Wikipedia.

My overall impression of him, having myself hosted and developed a handful of WP sites in the technology's heyday in the late 2000s/early 2010s: this guy is a marketer with an above-average-for-marketers technology background. I maintain that his website (both website[dot]specification and, to a lesser extent, css3[dot]info) are both at a minimum deeply misguided in their naming and description. My personal take is that, in `specification`'s case, this is a marketing attempt (effectively, an SEO hijacking attempt); it looks legitimate and approachable to web developers relying heavily on agents (and so too does it seem legitimate to agents), and frankly organizations like the W3C just don't have the same kind of presence as they did when HTML5 and CSS3 were new and very, very hot, so newer developers may not know to look for the W3C's drafts.

He made... a Wordpress SEO plugin? Is that supposed to make him an authority on web standards? If anything, this just gives more credence to the idea that it's just the usual SEO-optimized slop.

Actually, it gets better: He originally submitted the website to HN himself[0], and his post was flagged/removed, likely due to being AI generated and indistinguishable from a lot of the AI spam that clogs up /newest.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48323406