HTML is fairly easy and straight forward. If you find a web site you like, right click and view source and after a few tries you will start to pick out the things that made it work.
HTML is for delivering the image of the site to the viewer. Bloggs are primarily HTML because they don't do anything (we just read them). Once you start becoming curious about sites that do things you are venturing into the land of Java. Java is much harder to grasp and you won't find a menu selection to view Java.
So long as you understand the difference between the two, you will save a lot of frustration.
Basic HTML is easy and an average person can expect to muddle through it after only a few hours of study.
But then, BLOGGING takes most of the need for understanding HTML out of our hands, with all the WYSIWYG utilities popping up.