The first thing I thought of was your website when I heard the news. May she rest in peace.
I loved the real life Suzanne! ❤️❤️❤️❤️ and not to mention, Suzanne Vega, who is STILL ALIVE right now! But, the fictional Suzanne Somers still lives on as a fictional character for the SEFY Universe, and sometimes I use her as my Neocities avatar when communicating to other Neocitizens.
At first, yes but once you will understand some basic things you can do with HTML, with CSS and Javascript is much fun doing something than by pure HTML. As for not calling HTML a "programming language or markup language" I would say that markup language place better but still it kinda is also programming language, because it have some form of calculation
while the HTML language can be cryptic in some ways, this is why we sometimes see pre-typed code to copy, for things such as 88x31 buttons a Neocitizen uses to represent their website. I created so many 88x31 buttons to represent my site with, because I was finding more aesthetics over time.