• Text Editor
  
• Web Browser: Internet Explorer, Netscape
  
• A book to teach yourself HTML.

Important: Unlike normal text files, you have to save your file with a '.html' extension. For example: index.html. A web Browser is capable to translate you HTML document into a viewable page on the computer. The web browser understand the HTML tags used in your web site.

The advantages of coding 'plain' HTML in a text editor are:

• The coding is clean and does not have very extensive/ hard to understand code (vs. creating  in editors)
• You do not need software: wherever you are you can work with a text editor
• Good way to learn and understand HTML

Disadvantages:

• Time consuming
• Hard to add advanced features