u/Competitive_Aside461

I'll start with myself. I entered into web development without learning HTTP (and I'm sure most people do that even today). I began with HTML, then CSS, then JavaScript, then PHP. The moment I got to PHP and worked with such things as cookies, sessions, redirects, I was super super confused.

Had no idea what I was doing and why I was doing it the way I was. For example, back then in order to instruct the browser to redirect to a different location, I used the following code

header('Location: https://www.example.com')

I always wondered "What the hell is this weird looking statement." But then once I learned HTTP and its technical details, it all made sense. In essence it made me a much more confident web developer.

Make your life easy and just focus on the bare minimum:

• What HTML is and what it means for it to be "hypertext".
• Elements, tags, and attributes.
• What are headings (<h1> to <h6>) and paragraphs (<p>) and links (<a>).
• Lists in HTML (<ol> and <ul>)
• Block-level vs. inline elements (<div> and <span> included)
• A few text related elements (<strong>, <em>, <sup>, <sub>, etc.)
• Presenting code (<code> and <pre>)
• Embedding images (<img>)
• Tables (<table>, <tr>, <th>, and <td>) and how to merge table cells.

Most importantly, you don't need to learn forms, semantic HTML, or meta elements, rightaway.

Here's my rationale for it. For forms, you need to first know how the web server works and that's honestly a really early expectation from a complete newbie stepping into HTML.

Secondly, for semantic HTML (by which I mean elements like <nav>, <main>, <article>, <aside>), it's a good idea to also learn about ARIA and web accessibility because some of these elements work in tandem with ARIA. Again this is an early expectation from a complete newbie.

Lastly, for meta elements (like <link>, <script>), you usually need to know other technologies — CSS and JavaScript in this case — and therefore you can easily defer learning about them until you learn these technologies. (I mean like I don't see a point of teaching a newbie about the <script> element until he/she is taught JavaScript.)

I'm not saying that you should not learn forms or semantic HTML at all, just that you don't need it right away. Keep your priorities sorted out and that's when you'll really start enjoying the learning process.

Your thoughts?