Is it necessary to learn HTML/CSS before HTML5/CSS3?

HTML/ CSS the fundamentals of creating a website has changed a lot over the last decade. The latest HTML5/CSS3 has a lot of features and is used widely in the industry.

Common question budding developers ask is “If we need to learn HTML and CSS before learning HTML5/CSS3”. The thing about HTML5/CSS3 is its just the latest standards that the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has introduced.

So I think it necessary to learn HTML/CSS before HTML5/CSS to understand few concepts as to why World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) came up with HTML5/CSS3.

Few examples can justify my statements:

1. !Doctype-everyone knows the lengthy syntax or doctype for HTML4 and below, hell IE also had it’s own version and knowing HTML before HTML5 will give you a good semantic meaning behind what’s changed before to what it is today.
2. Semantic tags in HTML5 — So if you don’t know HTML and directly dive into html5, if I give you a question “ can you create a navbar and footer, without using the nav and footer tags, will u be able to do it?” , So I have asked the question to a lot of people and they have not been able to do it! Why because they don’t know the old way of doing, further if you are writing markup for IE<9 it’s not supported!
3. Polyfills and browser compatibility issues — so you know CSS3 and you would have ideally learned the display:flex or the float method of creating columns, try this on IE <10 tell me how it looks :p your markup would be completely destroyed and would you know how to fix this using display: table perhaps but when you learn something which is better and easier you tend not to go back to the old way of doing things. Other examples were Css3 animations and gradients.
4. Lastly what’s been deprecated and why what’s been added? So people who have developed sites would know that tags like <acronym> <big> are deprecated and what’s been added to HTML5- things like geolocation, local storage, etc. Why were these added? If only you go by history you would understand why people have gone through the effort and what difficulties they had to face to get here.

To Sum up, if you take HTML/CSS as a language then like other languages everyone would tell you to start from the bottom-up and if you do that you would have a better sense of the language and be a better developer overall.