A friend recently told me that he was interested in getting involved in the technology field, specifically Web Design/Development.

So I thought this would be a great opportunity for me to write a series of thorough tutorials on the basic web technologies for developers, beginning with HTML. After all as a wise man once said, to truly learn, one must teach. ;-)

The question I am asking myself is with HTML 4.01 still the officially released HTML standard, yet with HTML5 an emerging technology how should the novice web designer be taught HTML? Should they be taught the HTML 4.01 way and HTML5 be treated as a separate topic to be learned later? Should they be taught both at the same time seeing as both are present on the web at this time?

Or is it right to skip the old way and teach new students the HTML5 way, in order that they have a simpler introduction which best prepares them for the future?

Any thoughts/comments/suggestions would be appreciated.

Also relevant to this discussion would be a cross-section of data showing browser usage statistics along with the HTML5 feature support of those browsers, so we can look at the percentage of web users that already have support for basic HTML5 features.

If this number seems sufficient - it will only increase over time - we might not consider it to be that important for a new student of HTML to learn the old way. Any pointers to where such data can be found to asses these statistics would be appreciated as well.