When you type in a link into your browser and hit "Enter", a certain server is contacted and after a short while you see a webpage in your browser. The server does not send an image with the page you see, but some code (text) that your browser can read and create the pag. This code is called HTML - Hyper text markup language. If you're curios, you can always see the code for a page by choosing the option to view the source in your browser (right click and choose "View source" in Internet Explorer, CTRL+U in Firefox and Chrome etc).
Although HTML looks a little scary at first sight, it is quite simple. It is a markup language, because it basically augments the page text with some features. For example this text will be bolded will make the text bold. It actually does a little more, by allowing you to transform some of the text in links, gives you a way to insert images and other media types and many more.
So basically, learning HTML means knowing about the tags and how to combine them. While you may need some time to get a grasp on their majority, there is nothing complicated in it. It will take you some time to build pages, but you probably don't need more than a couple of hours to be able to understand most of a page's source.
There are a ton of free editors that can help you write html by auto completing your code, coloring so you can easy follow it and even giving you a live preview of the page.
What's important to remember is that HTML structures your text by dividing it into blocks, allowing you to have titles, lists, tables and more. HTML does not have the role of beautifying the page graphically, e.g. writing red text. This is what CSS is for. Take note that HTML did have this role in the past, so now and then you will stumble upon tutorials that do graphic styling with HTML. Refrain for doing this, as it is a technique that it's deprecated for over 10 years.
If you're planning to get into web design or development, HTML is a must-have. It will get you nothing by itself, you also need to learn at least CSS, but it is the starting point in the web programming/design business.
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