Levels of expertise in HTML — Are you ready for the tutorial?

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To help with those creating tutorials, as well as my own future tutorials, I would like to quantify levels of expertise in HTML. I have found that sometimes these skill levels are not well defined. So as a resource for students to gage if a tutorial is right for them I’ve come up with the following. For this scale, I will use Beginner, Basic, Intermediate, and Advanced to indicate what prior knowledge a student should know before taking on a tutorial. For each level, the student should know or have:

Beginner

• absolutely no previous knowledge of HTML.

Basic HTML

• An understanding of how opening tags and closing tags work
• How to create an HTML document with the proper DOCTYPE
• How to nest HTML tags within another
• How to use attributes, and use them to inline style or add required data. For example the <a> href attribute.
• How to use <style> and <script> to put CSS and JavaScript onto a HTML document

Intermediate HTML

• Knowing most of HTML tags in the language
• Understand when to use tags. Example the children of a <ul> tag should be <li> in most cases
• The client-server relationship in the abstract
• How to use attributes to style and identification for tags
• How to link external resources like CSS, and JavaScript into your HTML.
• An understanding of the Document Object Model or DOM works
• How your HTML will be read by accessible hardware such as screen readers

Advanced HTML

• Knowing all the HTML tags
• The ability to manipulate the DOM
• Understanding how to create your own attributes using data-*
• Build HTML documents semantically
• How your HTML will be read by Google, Facebook, etc. for content

In the end, this is only a guideline. There will be some tutorials out there that fall in that grey space between basic and intermediate, or intermediate and advanced.