Funnily enough I use to teach HTML at TAFE in my very early days of academia (around 1995)..
I originally taught myself HTML as I wanted to make my own webpage on Geocities. It was pretty basic stuff back then - Netscape (the internet browser at the time) didn't support tables so most pages were just line after line similiar to reading a book from the top of the page to the bottom of the page. Lots of cool blinking text and twirling gifs though!
Do a search for HTML tutorials on Google. There are heaps!
cheers,
Glen