I'm delving into webdesign for some stuff I'm working on. I figured I'd give myself a crash course/refresher on html and keep things simple. I don't like unnecessarily fancy/bloated websites and certainly wouldn't design a site that way. Also html is easy as shizzing and USED to be able to do what I want. Now I'm finding out that I have to learn XHTML which is fine... just seems to mostly be about proper nesting and stuff which  I'd do anyway BUT it also seems to require some special code at the top for DOCTYPE and it looks like there's a crapload of them for different purposes. THEN I find out W3 has decided for HTML5 to drop support for many of the common formatting options I'm used to and was going to use like center and fonts and align and whatnot. You're supposed to use CSS (stylesheets) for formatting which is a completely other coding language. I'm also getting the impression that style sheets won't load properly if the user uses NoScript (like I do) and doesn't want to allow the main domain (or wherever the stylesheet lives).
 
On top of THAT I have never been able to get the Alt Char funtion on this laptop to work properly and of course the little squiggly brackets used in CSS are Alt Characters.
 
Sonnova fwaaaaagggakakakakaka!!!!!
 
*sigh*
 
I'm probably over thinking this and maybe I can get away with just sticking to XHTML fundamentals but I would HATE to write a massive website only to have it start going wonky with new browsers in the future.

And here I thought my little PHP5 problem was a roadblock.

Oh yeah... I "forgot" I have to learn all the server stuff too like databases and FTP but that looks simple enough when using a host. Building my own server looks interesting but a LOT of work with lots of potential for epic failure.
 
Ain't nobody got time for that.
 
Edit: And as nice and fuzzy sounding as those webdesign programs look I a) really want to learn how to do all this with a simple text editor and b) I'm a little wary of what kind of superfluous gack those programs might put in that could cause problems. I want to keep things so simple as far as the actual code that I can convey a ton of info but still allow Joe Mountainman with a painfully slow connection and a computer made from rocks and twigs to be able to load it reasonably quickly. Just text, tables and links. Maybe Show/Hide buttons or a separate version of the site for embedded stuff like pictures, audio and/or video that relate to the text.

I couldn't imagine creating a web page without CSS now, it makes things so much easier. I wouldn't call it a coding language, you're just setting out styles. However the biggest complication is likely to be the differences by which each browser interprets styles. There are differences of a few pixels here and there which can really frustrate you. However once you've learned the basics of CSS then look into using the 960 Grid system. It's a downloadable set of CSS styles which help with your layout and fix browser issues so you don't have to think about them.
 
You don't need web design programs at all, in fact I feel like they're a hindrance more than anything. I've used Dreamweaver before but only as a fancy text editor - it has some nice project management tools. Really all you need is Notepad++ - it's a very good free editor for coding which colors your code as you write it and knows how to indent properly etc.

When you use something like MS Word or OpenOffice (I'll probably be using the latter if I decide to use a word processing for webpage formatting to speed things up) and use the Save As Webpage option does it use CSS to insert the formatting or the HTML 4 tags?
 
Guess I could just try it out later but I only have OpenOffice (not spending money on MS crap).

Once you get used to using css you will find the old way pretty inefficient and less functional. Particularly if you need to make wholesale changes to style of entire site. Noscript is not affected at all by css. If it was very few sites would work with it since every major site I know of uses them. Sites have too much dynamic data to work properly without css.

Btw, word processing programs tend to spit out awful code that takes more work to make compliant than if you had just created decent code from scratch.

I honestly don't think saving Word or Open Office documents as web pages will give very good results - you're just going to get a basic HTML page. I don't think it creates a CSS file. The trouble with this is that should you want to change the style of a common page element later (presuming you're going to be making multiple pages) then you're going to have to go into each page separately and change it. Whereas when you have a CSS style sheet then if say you want to change the size and color of all main titles, you just make a quick adjustment to the global style and all of your pages are fixed. I guarantee you'll be able to get the basics down in an afternoon.

dubdisciple
Once you get used to using css you will find the old way pretty inefficient and less functional. Particularly if you need to make wholesale changes to style of entire site. Noscript is not affected at all by css. If it was very few sites would work with it since every major site I know of uses them. Sites have too much dynamic data to work properly without css.

Btw, word processing programs tend to spit out awful code that takes more work to make compliant than if you had just created decent code from scratch.

Good to know. I'll probably just create my own HTML templates and reuse them as needed. I'll read up more on CSS and learn it too but so far I know basic HTML will do everything I need it to. My only concern are the articles stating that HTML5 won't "support" those tags. I mean I figured if I followed HTML 4.1 rules it would be backwards compatible pretty much forever but if that is NOT the case then I need to know so once I start creating the templates I'm not designing something that'll need a full overhaul in the future.
 
The other reason I want to use HTML 4.1 exclusively if possible is so people using older browsers can do so. If newer browsers are gonna get cranky about it... well that's gonna make me cranky. Also if I'm "validating" my pages through W3's tool and it throws compliance errors because I used a center tag or whatever instead of CSS even though it WILL work in perpetuity... well that's gonna be really annoying.

sharke
I honestly don't think saving Word or Open Office documents as web pages will give very good results - you're just going to get a basic HTML page. I don't think it creates a CSS file. The trouble with this is that should you want to change the style of a common page element later (presuming you're going to be making multiple pages) then you're going to have to go into each page separately and change it. Whereas when you have a CSS style sheet then if say you want to change the size and color of all main titles, you just make a quick adjustment to the global style and all of your pages are fixed. I guarantee you'll be able to get the basics down in an afternoon.

Again, good to know and I appreciate that you guys are offering me some experienced input on this because it is important to me. I guess currently I'm forcing myself through the very fundamentals of it all specifically to learn/practice and after a lot of thought and prep over the years I've got a vision as to how I'd like it all to work/look and it is as absolutely basic as it can get so as not to have any distractions or hindrances to the content itself. If I find that I can use the 4.1 tags and have them be future ready for whatever the browser programmers tinker with then I'll stick with that and consider it like a book. If it was done right the first time there will be no need to change it. I think for my vision the most important thing will be making sure each and every page can access a site map (which seem to have gone out of fashion for some reason). 
 
Then all the content will already be there and if I decide to build a fancier version down the road I should, in theory, be able to copy/paste the meat of it all and code around that.
 
I don't like fancy though. I actually hate it. The only thing I really want to be fancy about is perhaps a mobile version at some point.

Keep in mind that html 4 was often used in a way that required lots of hacks and workarounds. In fact backwards compatibility is a much bigger problem with html 4 documents than xhtml. Older browsers will read xhtml just fine because it is very basic and clean code with no hacks. With html 4 different broswers and device s have very unpredicatble results due to the very different ways each handles the hacks necessary for formatting layout. I remember the nightmares I used to have getting sites to look the same using firefox, IE and Safari. The really awesome thing about seperating content from style is that you can make the most basic layout or the most elaborate without touching your html. Same thing goes for platforms. I used to basically design three sites and embed a browser detection script. Pain in the you know what and hellish to make changes.