Really, I wasn't sure when I wrote that. Refsnes Data, who owns/runs the site, isn't affiliated with the W3C in any official capacity that I know of.
I was thinking more of a story I heard on an old episode of Hypercritical where John described first learning HTML and the rest through a combination of (mostly) O'Reilly books and reading the specs themselves.
While I suppose this passed muster in the early/mid 90's, I would repeat my earlier claim that the specs nowadays are more for implementers, and not something really well suited to teach you how to use the various languages and tools.
Potentially losing what is perhaps the most approachable reference for this purpose would be terrible for everyone.
