I started coding web pages for an online multi-gaming league system with quite a large community. I started by viewing help sites that basically just gave you codes. I copied and pasted until they made pages.

Then I Google'd for HTML tutorials and got the w3schools HTML tutorial. I went through that twice, got 100% in the quiz then I started browsing the other languages on the left hand side. So I then progressed onto CSS implementation and the extension of HTML in XHTML.

After that someone from the help site I used to go on took a look at one of my pages and though he liked my design and layout, he critisized the standards of coding that I'd use. That's when I started looking into standards compliance in XHTML and CSS and he explained about accessibility very briefly. So then I went and Google'd web accessibility and started reading through the WAI's guidelines.

After that I went back to the w3schools site and began learning XML, XSLT, XPath, XForms and DTD. By the end of all that I'd gathered a load of information on how HTML documents should be structured, why they should be structured in each way and how different browsers handle different nodes differently (DDD ). From all that I'd also learnt a lot about how to not use tables but to go for block-level elements such as dividers, spans and paragraphs.

Bit of a mixture but a lot of it was viewing other people's work, firguring out what stuff does, trying to reform it on my own and then trial and error'ing it.