| CSS is worthless by itself. It is a markup language used to give style to a document. XHTML, on the other hand, is a markup language to write a document in. XHTML and CSS work together.
Buy a book for both, or one that covers both.
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If you're feeling cheap, you can also learn CSS/XHTML on the Internet without buying a book because XHTML and CSS are really simple markup languages, even if you want to look into more advanced subjects such as namespaces and DTDs. Because they aren't programming languages, there are not very many complex paradigms or techniques that you need to get a hang of.
For CSS:
Tutorial: http://css.maxdesign.com.au/selectutorial/
Reference: http://www.w3schools.com/css/css_reference.asp
And for XHTML:
Tutorial: http://www.w3schools.com/xhtml/
Reference: http://www.zvon.org/xxl/xhtmlReference/Output/index.html
The only learning issue with using the Internet that would be particular relevant to you now would be the use of just CSS only -- no tables -- to build a layout. Then again, after some use and reading around tutorials and samples on the Internet, it may only take you a week or less to get the hang of it and be able to build pages backward-compatible all the way back to NS4.
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Dreamweaver is useful, but if you write the code 100% by yourself, it will be cleaner and smaller. Whereas you know _exactly_ what you want to do, Dreamweaver doesn't. This is especially true if you ever get around to adding interactive features to your site that downgrade. If you happen to be a perfectionist, writing your own code is also the way to go.
If you want a good programming text editor, try either Notepad++ or SciTE:
SciTE: http://www.scintilla.org/SciTE.html
Notepad++: http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm
There are also:
PSPad: http://www.pspad.com/ (slow startup, though better than Dreamweaver)
Crimson Editor: http://www.crimsoneditor.com/ |