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When I first looked at HTML, I thought it looked extremely complicated. I thought it would be very difficult to master it. After spending a few hours with it, however, it blows me away how quickly someone can create a very user friendly web page. Needless to say, I'm pleasantly surprised. I think that everyone should do an intro course on HTML. I justify this, because of the tremendous growth of the internet in our daily lives. It has become nothing short of a necessity for daily life.
My only thought is whether I should completely memorize the header information. All the stuff required to get my HTML code to pass the validation test seems a bit much to commit to memory, but I would like to do so by the end of this course. I always feel safer if I'm not relying solely on the internet for reference. It's nice to have reference, but even better to be able to just sit down at an offline location, or on a plane or on a small device and start coding.
HTML is the basic building block upon which the phenomenon that is the world wide web is built. I ask whether the "founders" of the web really saw what would become of it. I get the feeling that they were explorers, more so than visionaries. There had to have been visionaries, but I think that Tim Berners Lee was probably an explorer, creating the hypertext markup language, and then marveling as it took off as the standard upon which web pages were built.
I fear that the web, and HTML, along with all the scripting languages imbedded in web pages, is heading fast down the same path that the automobile has gone down. Engines used to be simple, but as technology grows, so does the complication level. I forsee that web technolgies will grown increasingly complex. I believe the web will always be accessible to anyone, but the pressure will be to push the envelope with more animation, more scripting, more flair. All of that flair will cost something in terms of the level of sophistication. For example, look at a web page like Facebook®. I can at this point in my education level put up a working, validated web page easily in a day. But to put up a facebook would take months of programming, and it wouldn't be HTML, it would be some other language, probably many times more complicated.