HTML Help/Guides

If you try to do any advanced HTML tricks, you'll probably need to get into the actual use of the language. Or maybe you just want to find out how it actually works. Either way, the following links are for you...

NCSA Beginner's Guide to HTML

Highly recommended. The first documentation I read when I started learning HTML.

Bare Bones Guide to HTML

A good reference in both HTML and plain text formats. Includes all the new HTML 3.2 tags.

HTML Made Really Easy

A good, quick intro to HTML and the popular tags.

HTML: An Interactive Tutorial for Beginners

A fairly good try-as-you-learn HTML tutorial

I highly recommend the following two following help files:

HTML Help by The Web Design Group

Help files specifically for HTML 3.2 for both Windows and Mac. Very useful for writing HTML that complies with the HTML 3.2 standard.

The HTML Reference Library

A handy help file for Windows 3.1 or 95/NT which includes tags for standard HTML, Netscape and Internet Explorer. Has clickable images so you can see what the tags are supposed to look like.

With the increase of HTML editors designed to do everything and web browsers that add their own special "features", there's been a decrease in the number of pages that use valid HTML. Just because it looks okay in one browser doesn't mean it will work on all browsers.
Writing HTML that follows a standard means that it should look at least okay in any browser that follows those standards; which increases the potential audience of your pages.
The following sites check the HTML of a page against the standard you choose and lets you know if it finds any errors.

W3C HTML Validation Service

A validator provided by the W3 Consortium. It checks most variations of HTML coding

Doctor HTML

Not as strict a validator as W3C's, but it catches most errors that could cause display problems. It can also check images, spelling, and even gives an estimate of the download time over a 14.4 modem connection. It can do both single pages or entire sites, but you must pay if you want to use the site checking feature.