The following pages are (either/both) a look at the history of HTML and web design (or/and) an attempt to teach basic HTML best practices.
I start by talking about things that happened shortly before my birth, before the web, in "the before time," if you will. By the second lesson I'm talking from first-hand experience of Web 2.0 and onwards. There are lots of opinions. You probably can't change my mind.
The first lesson teaches you how to view the source of a webpage. I'm not looking to become a tutorial site, but I offer explanations for what I've written in the source of each of these lessons. I think it's worthwhile looking at these comments in conjunction with free lessons available all over the web as a jumping-off point to making your own pages.
You'll know how to build older, better. You'll also learn why the web was the way it was, and how that influenced the way it is.
At present, there's a stark divide between resources teaching how to write for the old web and how to write for the new web. I taught myself to type while learning HTML, writing all my tags in uppercase, defining my font color right there in the attributes. If you were to do that today, browsers might comply with your demands, but validators would turn their noses up at your bad, old practices. These tutorials, where possible, use modern web techniques to recapture the appearance of older websites while remaining compliant with HTML standards. They also describe what it felt like to move through a web populated by pages that used older technology. What did that mean for useability? You can find out by seeing the pages the lessons inhabit, and also from my descriptions of how the paradigm of the old web operated.
Your face is pretentious. (:
I'd start with Lesson 1. Or if you don't want to, you can also go back home.