Honestly? If this were back-end programming I'd agree, but as someone who's done a tremendous amount of front-end programming, the guide feels spot-on.
Sure many of these questions are "quirks of history", but your job as an effective front-end programmer is to know them so your site works everywhere where it's supposed to, and you have the knowledge to make the right trade-offs between legacy support and future maintainability. Front-end programming really is much more about sheer accumulated knowledge than back-end is -- and it's not knowledge you can just "look up", because a huge part is knowing the gotchas in advance, in order to avoid them.
This shouldn't be a whole interview -- all the things you list are important too -- but validating a candidate's experience of all these "transient factoids" is not just valid but necessary, like it or not.
Sure many of these questions are "quirks of history", but your job as an effective front-end programmer is to know them so your site works everywhere where it's supposed to, and you have the knowledge to make the right trade-offs between legacy support and future maintainability. Front-end programming really is much more about sheer accumulated knowledge than back-end is -- and it's not knowledge you can just "look up", because a huge part is knowing the gotchas in advance, in order to avoid them.
This shouldn't be a whole interview -- all the things you list are important too -- but validating a candidate's experience of all these "transient factoids" is not just valid but necessary, like it or not.