>Personally I think CodeAcademy is just a bad meme.
Respectfully, OP was asking for resources related to learning HTML and CSS from a non-technical point of view. From a standing start, JavaScript is a way down the line in the web development part -- not the beginnings of HTML and CSS for web design.
Sure, Codecademy is not the be-all solution, but they're accessible enough to get started for a broad section of non-technical folks, hence my recommendation.
Codecademy has hundreds of little exercises. Often, first they introduce you to a concept where you just read through the example and press Pass if you got it. After that you always have to write or correct code yourself. Pointing out at one particular exercise can not prove that the approach itself is bad.
Respectfully, OP was asking for resources related to learning HTML and CSS from a non-technical point of view. From a standing start, JavaScript is a way down the line in the web development part -- not the beginnings of HTML and CSS for web design.
Sure, Codecademy is not the be-all solution, but they're accessible enough to get started for a broad section of non-technical folks, hence my recommendation.
Edit: italics.