[steve8918]

It is a Python script I execute from a PHP file, so it doesn't have any knowledge except for the files that I am trying to scan.

I google just about any HTML issue I have, so I don't spend too much time trying to learn the intricacies of it. If anything, trying to understand why CSS was behaving as it was, was what got me closest to smashing my keyboard more than a handful of times. Stupid Wordpress.

But I don't think it's necessarily a waste of time for absolute beginners to learn and memorize HTML as their first exposure to "programming". Having a fundamental understanding of how making changes to a script or file affects the output to a web browser is something that I imagine most non-programmers aren't familiar with, so having a firm grasp of this concept will probably help them digest more advanced concepts later on. Being able to whip up a web page is probably one of the first things I would teach beginners if I ever taught a course on programming.