Hi Edward,
I think you are looking at this in the wrong way, no matter what language you choose to learn (a nd I suggest .NET using a free tool visual web developer) you will always be writting HTML if you like it or not.
All languages output HTML as that is what the browser reads, an example is to look a the source of this page, notice you only see HTML, yet the real source code is hidden because it has been coverted into HTML, so to make a website using a language you first need to learn how it works, hence learning HTML (it is very easy)
Also when making a website in .NET or any other language you need to make your website look nice, and formatted. Partically in .NET you need to sometimes do this at runtime so you need to know the HTML syntax for (bold, italic, css class, etc, etc)
Just get yourself a cheap HTML book and go on w3schools website and build yourself a very basic website in HTML, once you are happy with the syntax you can then start adding powerful .NET code around it.