I'm convinced the best way to learn HTML and Web design is through trial and error, experiment and play. It's also valuable to have students develop their own rubric of good and bad information design based on user testing and samples. While they have good, basic skills with these tools, they flounder when tasked with developing a visually rich hardcopy text, so locked are they in the conventions of essays and type. I've concluded that it is perhaps not useful to teach HTML or Web design without linking these forms to other processes and tools, traditional or otherwise. Students need a variety of skills and theory, and these can't be discrete from each other or the communicative elegance of hypermedia will be missed.
Audiences expand the mythologies of a creator's world.