By reading the specs you will at least understand some of the browsers’ behaviours that otherwise can seem just random. What you do with that knowledge is up to you.

The two are often consistent, but not always. While the W3C recommendations are often a great guide, many of them are outdated and in some cases archaic. As designers we might know that this is the case, but many clients don’t – and indeed in the public sector they specifically *require* adherence to obsolete aspects of W3C.

W3C is definitely worthwhile and has done a lot of great work to encourage good practice, but I think they need to be far more responsive and flexible in their approach before we can genuinely consider them to be anything approaching an effective manual of good practice.