I have been studying cert 4 Web Design for a year now and I am not sure that I am up to the standard I should be. Can you let me know is my understanding that HTML is the 'favoured' code to use and CSS?

It is just that someone mentioned to me the XHTML was going to be the future and someone else said to study PHP as much as I could.

Currently I do most of my work in HTML and CSS with a tiny bit of PHP..

Thanks
Kymberly

XHTML will be the future as its much more user friendly and browsers seem to take well to it.

PHP is preferable if you want to create interactive websites but I know next to nothing regarding PHP but thats because I choose to stick to the design side as opposed to the programming side.

Keep sticking with CSS though!

xhtml 1.0 and html 4.01 are basically the same thing. xhtml really isn't anything more complicated than html. if you're using lowercase in all your html tags and making sure to use closing tags for everything you've got about 90% of xhtml down. xhtml is just a little stricter and makes us webmasters more responsible for coding out pages better, since it's a little less forgiving.

I would use xhtml over html since it is the way forward, but it's perfectly fine to use html.

CSS is definitely something you should be using and I'm glad to see you are. Do you use it mainly for styling things or are you using a css layout instead of table based layouts?

PHP is a server side programming language which can help add interactivity to your site. You'll usually combine it with a database like mysql. There are other server side languages like asp or jsp and other databases you can use as well. It's good for a web designer to know something about server side languages and databases since you will undoubtedly encounter clients who want things where they are necessary.

You may also want to learn a client side programming language like JavaScript. You'll probably encounter people wanting things where a client side language is required before encountering those who require server side languages, but that's a pretty big generalization on my part.

One of the fun parts of web design, for me anyway, is the learning never ends. Everythink I learn opens up new possibilties in learning. In time you will probably want to know all of the languages I mentioned, but it's ok to learn them one at a time and at your own pace.

There really is a never ending learning process that goes along with web design and development. In time you'll probably also develop in interest in how search engines work and how to optimize web pages and websites for them.