Despite the impression you may get when first seeing a page of HTML, it's an easy language to learn. When you're writing HTML, you're not programming a computer, you're marking up text to be displayed in a browser. It's a bit like formatting text in Microsoft Word, except that you use text-based tags to create the formatting. This makes the markup more visible, and more robust. The basic tags that are used to create a simple document are easy to learn, and are structured logically so that documents can be written and read intuitively.

HTML was also designed so that the author of the document didn't need to worry about presentation of the page on the screen. However, as the web has evolved, web authors have taken more control over presentation to get the look they want, and HTML has evolved to cope with that by adding presentational tags.

As HTML evolved into HTML 5.0 , much of this presentational aspect is being removed again, because other languages have grown up to cope with the presentation, notably Cascading StyleSheets (CSS). We'll look at this aspect in the practical classes.