I began doing web development in 1996, at a time where most people were first learning about the “World Wide Web”. Not my primary job function, I simply taught myself HTML so that I could post documentation and experiment results to avoid being interrupted at work with the same question 20 times a day.
Having experience with these fundamental building blocks of websites affords me a deeper understanding of the workings of web pages and scripts than many. It enables me to fix issues that others might not be able. It also affords me the freedom to create nearly anything someone can imagine rather than being at the mercy of what is available for me to cut and paste into a site.