O.K. here's the deal. I can't go to school to learn programming like I want, because I have outstanding student loans that I can't pay on. So, since I'm here, I figure I'll ask some questions. With regards to the basics, HTML, should I be using HTML when creating my site or the XHTML? I'm still a little unsure of the exact differences, but once I know were to go, I will get the correct books and website information. And what about CSS? Is there newer or older versions? I have one book already which teaches some about HTML and CSS, but I haven't gotten very far into, just what I already know about HTML. And what are the advantages to using PHP on a site? I have a book on that too, which is a little harder for me to grasp, but if it has alot of advantages, i will surly read it. Is there any other languages that are good for a site? I am nowhere near ready to understand C or C+ or anything like that yet.

xHTML is HTML that conforms to valid XML syntax, strictly. It's really up to you. I tend to use xHTML because I like doing DOM tricks and HTML validators don't do the best job at checking for conformance errors that will crash the crap out of the XML validator when I try to build the DOM.

Here's a link to briefly outline the differences: http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/xhtml_html.asp

Using CSS is almost mandatory with xHTML since alot of the tags used to control styling (like ALIGN) are deprecated, forcing use of css stylesheets or style attributes. As far as CSS versions, version n+1 just expands on version n, but many browsers don't support the latest/greatest CSS, so keeping the CSS as basic as possible is the approach I would take.

The advantage of using PHP is that it is server-side and dynamic, so you get the dynamic pages without the incompatibilities introduced with doing things clientside, with say, javascript to get dynamic data.

This post has been edited by ethergeek: Mar 9 2007, 05:40 PM

Ethergeek is correct. Its really up to you on what you use, and w3schools is a great place to start. I learn most of my programming languages from there. But if you want a tip I would probably grasp knowledge of HTML first. Becase it is really easy and flexible, but its also know as a very messy language, if you even consider it as a language. But if you can and want to learn it straight from the start, learn XHTML. It is becoming known that it is the web development standard because its contains clearer and concise coding schemes. After you have applied yourself with any of the two you should definitely take on CSS, because tables that is used in html now is considered evil. And its best that you use CSS if you wanted to create and tables because it gives the developer flexibility on updating a site. Well good luck.