upgrade from html

[Pant Leg Eater from the Bad World]

I want to build a website. I know html fairly well, but I want to know more. Not only that, but I want to know more than html. any suggestions on what I should be learning to update/upgrade my skills?

[Cloud No.9]

css, apache, mysql and php are the next steps.

[Pant Leg Eater from the Bad World]

what are those specifically?

[Cloud No.9]

css is for layout. apache is for servers and ftp shenagins. php and mysql are for databases and forms.

[Samuraid]

CSS for fancier visual styles, PHP for dynamic pages

[bipper]

XML, css, php, and any database program that works with php is a great start (MySql being one of the easier to use).

I have honestly stopped using HTML in most my new works. I have switched to xml tags which are the styled by CSS. It's the future mabey? All in all, I love the XML solution over Html or xhtml.

http://www.sitepoint.com/
Has some great books with downloadable samples for ya. Download the PHP & mySql one fo sho!

http://www.w3schools.com/
has loads of good info for ya too.

Enjoy!

quick edit: The xml is teh future was mostly a joke. XHTML will always be around, I just prefer the XML way for certain projects. I would learn em both if I was you!
Bipper

[Dr Unne]

If you were to pick one to learn first, I would recommend CSS.
CSS is not only for "fancy styling", it's for cleaner and more technically sound styling. The benefits of CSS are numerous. If you aren't familiar with XHTML standards, I would recommend learning them too. The standards are easy to learn; it's just a certain way of writing HTML. I second the recommendation of http://www.w3schools.com/ as a place to learn.

Scripting languages like PHP or Perl are not of much use unless you know what kind of HTML/CSS you want to be producing as the final product. To oversimplify greatly, scripting languages are a way to dynamically produce HTML/CSS. Many parts of web pages are duplicate information. A header, a navigation section, a footer. Rather than type those over and over 100 times, you can write a script to produce those sections automatically. Then if you need to make a change to the header section (for example) you change one PHP instead of changing 100 HTML files.

SQL is entirely useless unless you know a scripting language. PHP or Perl or Ruby or some other language are required to take data out of a database and display it.