http://www.w3schools.com

I’m going to give that a whirl and look into your other suggestions.

Great question.

Personally I started with a copy of “SAMS Teach yourself HTML in 24 hours”. The 1998 copy I had is now way out of print, as is its successor which is still available though; SAMS Teach yourself HTML and XHTML in 24 hours.

I outgrew that book very quickly and found O’Reilly’s HTML & XHTML: The Definitive Guide to be the best companion book. Since then, I’ve not really used any other HTML reference book.

With these books at my side I taught myself the fundamentals of HTML but the best by far is for people to roll their sleeves up, dive in, create some HTML/XHTML pages and sites and learn from their mistakes.

A personal site is the best way to start IMO. Start from scratch. People should build everything themselves to start with, learning what works, what doesn’t work and as long as they ask the question “how can I do this better or more efficiently” then they can eventually move on to new platforms. I wouldn’t recommend anyone learning HTML to build their first site on Wordpress for instance. It’s too complicated for newbies and they’re not really getting into raw HTML.

As for favourite sites or blogs on how to start in HTML/XHTML I haven’t visited one for looking up how to code HTML in years. Personally I would Google what I’m looking for e.g. tableless design in HTML and open each decent result in a new tab; try each tutorial and whichever one suits you in terms of ease of instruction, successful completion of the task, like their style etc then that’s the one. Bookmark it, tweet it, blog it

Ultimately nothing beats experience and even the most experienced designers & coders have lapses. I recently completed a year-long site build in which the template designer and the PHP developer left a glaring number of errors in the XHTML 1.0 strict which I could only solve by re-coding some of the most obvious and easy errors and then use an XHTML 1.0 transitional DTD to “cure” the rest.