Re: Err...
Hmm, no with a tiny little hint of yes...
HTML does not teach programming - not even close. In some ways it actually hinders it; some of the worst HTML I've ever seen has been written by programmers - it's a totally different mindset.
HTML is purely presentational, what it teaches is the importance of semantics, do you mean strong* or do you mean b (or span style="font-weight: bold;"); are you trying to give semantic importance to the text or just make it bold because it looks better?
It teaches you that browsers will screw you over and different rendering engines will cause you headaches - making something that looks exactly the same on every platform can be an act of will and sheer bloody-mindedness.
Programming on the other hand is 95% problem solving and 5% writing the code; it's basically algebra with conditional statements (ok, functions and objects as well) - it has nothing really to do with semantics or making stuff pretty, it's about getting stuff working in, hopefully, an efficient and maintainable manner. The fundamentals of programming, the mindset if you like, can be transferred, almost in its entirety, to any programming language, programming is largely a way of thinking.
HTML, however, is a basically a way of doing, it's pretty much non-transferable (well, apart from the lessons it teaches in semantics); hell it might look a bit like XML but drop an XSL file in front of someone who's spent "an afternoon programming in HTML" and they'll be totally lost. HTML does not help you think like a programmer.
The one teeny, tiny, "yes" I'd add as a proviso would be, using myself as an example... I've always been a "tinkerer" with computers, from making maps in WorldCraft for Quake to reverse engineering the galaxy in X3 (less complicated than it sounds, the galaxy is written in XML apparently)... but somewhere long the way, doing my degree course many years ago when the web was new and shiny, I discovered websites...
Some random homepage that someone had cobbled together made me realise, "hey, I really want to know how to do that!" - and that it was something I could teach myself to do (with the aid of a few websites).
So I taught myself HTML - which was nice but a little static....
So I taught myself JavaScript (and DHTML as it was known when the web was steam powered) - which was nice but it's all a bit tedious to update, especially when you've built some templates that you're repeatedly displaying on a page...
So I learnt about SQL and databases and PHP to make maintenance easier - which is nice enough but PHP is pretty much purely web-based and I wanted to do more...
So I started on Java and C++ and C# and now the loose-typing, lack of proper method over-riding and slightly iffy OOP implementations in PHP annoy me slightly... and I'm still learning...
Where I go from here is anyone's guess - I'm an in-house web-dev, I still enjoy working on the LAMP stack - and it was HTML that made me realise that this is what I wanted to do (it's the immediacy with HTML, it's very quick to get something on screen - it's one of the things I like about C# as well).
*[whilst it's nice having HTML enabled in posts - it's a bit inconvenient, when trying to get tags to output, that < and > don't get converted]