Newbie question Wysiwyg vs Html

frontpage is like a GUI front for html, there are so much better you can do with knowing exactly what an html tag can do rather than make frontpage generate some tags for you. Many technology is also out there which complements html, more so like css, php, javascript etc... I suggest you read the threads, and start learning html through the W3C school web site... or lycos' web monkey tutorials...

Lots of HTML tutorials out there, just search google for them.
Once you get comfortable with the tags and what they do, take a look at XHTML. You can try search for XHTML tutorials but there aren't many decent ones out there, the ones that are there are very CSS biased and teach you CSS rather than XHTML. Learning CSS is a great thing to learn also as it will take you far but you first need to understand what the tags (html) actually do.

Welcome to your new addiction

Definitely do learn xHTML. If nothing else it will help you to understand what FrontPage is doing and know how to fix it if it's not behaving the way you want it to.

I did say xHTML - it's the newest version of HTML and has some significant differences from the older versions. Best to learn the newest techniques rather than adapting later on. Although it seems to me that most tutorials assume basic knowledge of HTML so you might have to start there. W3Schools is a good place to learn.

Plus, lets not forget that Front Page is made for making pages look good in Internet Explorer, and hoping you get the gist of it in other browsers.

One of my favorite examples of bad Front Page site, my hometown:

http://www.stow.oh.us/

Check it out in IE and Firefox, compare not only slight differeneces, but complete wording differences in some headers (and how some are completely gone in FF) througout the site.

(Yes I have several times e-mailed them offering to help them clean it up and teach them how to make it look better for FREE just because I want my hometown to have a halfway decent page, however, no replies yet tracking shows they checked out my sample pages made for them)

-Greg

Ack I forgot about this thread somehow after I started it, I have no idea how that happened...I'm sorry

Thank you for the tips, ive been reading some html tutorials to try to learn it but its slow going.

What im mainly curious about is what exactly is easier/harder about something like frontpage, VS notepad and html? It seems so much easier to just load up frontpage and drag and drop and insert etc, to see exactly what im doing as Im doing it. It just seems overall faster to click a single button to center a line of text, instead of having to write out some extra html.

Im definatly reading up on it and trying to learn it though im not looking for an easy way out hehe, im just confused as to what would actually be better.

And if I was to try to learn css, php, javascript etc I assume It would be alot easier if I understand HTML pretty well first right? I'm sure im a long long way off from that, but just a general wondering =)

FrontPage is easier that way until it doesn't want to, or can't, do what you want it to do. If you know what the code is doing you can have a lot more control over everything. I personally prefer to work back and forth between code view and WYSIWYG in Dreamweaver - it makes the easy stuff faster but lets me have full control over the hard parts.

And you're right, if you want to learn any other web languages you need to have a strong understanding of HTML first.

Learning HTML will help you to learn web standards and start coding your pages the right way