Sorry, AerBabe, I can see this degenerating into a religeous debate...
Blacksheep...
AerBabe said
"However, I really want to learn to do this...": Now while I agree that HTML 3 isn't the latest standard, and doesn't include CSS, it's perfectly OK for somebody who wants to learn the
bascis ofhow to create web pages for themselves.
"there's not much point in trying to write your own code unless you're a true geek." -- I'm not sure if that's intended to be an insult or a compliment
"Much better for the amateur to use a ready made web authoring program such as Microsoft's Front Page. Then you just follow the program's built in tutorial until you have something worth publishing on the web." I would certainly agree that content is much more important then format, but that "bad format" can make "good content" very hard to follow. Unless you have well-thought out content, all the "presentation eye-candy" in the world isn't going to help...
"Frames based pages are fine in these days of almost universal IE Explorer - how many of those funny old text only browsers are there in use today? Frames based sites are usually much easier to navigate. Images were a problem in the days of 14400 dial-up modems but as long as the image size is minimized - respectable jpeg images around 30K will load in seconds on even the slowest dial-up - images aren't a problem as long as you don't put too many on one page. "
Well, I profoundly disagree about the need to pander to the lowest common denominator, no matter how ubiquitous it is, instead of aspiring to standards compliance. A site does not need Flash, bells, whistles, and all other manner of flashing lights in order to be effective...
I'll shutup now...