btw, freehostia isn't free anymore.

http://www.freehostia.com/free-chocolate.html

Wrong.

There's 000webhost but there are some rules and it's best not to use any databases with them. No ads will be placed on your site, btw, so it's a good enough choice if you want that.

I'm currently taking a class in Xhtml and Css. So far we've covered all the basics and I've done my own portfolio website.

I couldn't imagine doing a site without using CSS...

I can, since I made several websites without using CSS. Because at that time (years ago), there's no CSS (or at least, haven't popular yet).

And right now, I teach my student HTML and Dreamweaver, without CSS or PHP or Javascript. So I must teach them to build nice websites using only HTML. It's doable, but takes quite a time to make even a single (good) page.

You can do decent pages with HTML. You just have to be proficient with tables and know how to design.

While I agree that tables are a legitimate design element, it's impossible to construct a 'decent' website without use of styles. HTML attributes and formatting tags only allow you to change basic colors and fonts. For example, you can't adjust margin and padding of most elements (table cells being a rare exception) without CSS rules; nor can you change how a link looks when hovered or clicked with only HTML attributes.

I think this is somewhat of a moot point, though. HTML and CSS are not really different things -- there's no good reason whatsoever to use only HTML in a website: CSS has been supported by browsers for aeons, and, even ignoring its expressiveness, it's the only way to actually abstract the design of your site from the content. Without style sheets, even if you can change the font color on one link, you must re-write the font tag for every single link. CSS was invented to fix that problem, and ignoring CSS is not going to help you in the long run. In my opinion, it's best to learn HTML and CSS at the same time, since each is integral to the other.

Really, HTML and CSS are just two parts of the trio of client-side technologies: HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Each fills a role the others cannot replace, and it's mostly pointless to talk about doing such-and-such without one of them (though, on occasion, avoiding JS for something CSS can do instead is a good idea -- JS is the swiss-army knife of web design, and can be made to do many things it shouldn't).

I disagree. You can make a decent website using just HTML. You won't have anything fancy like hover effects and so on but you can still make a nice looking website if you know what you're doing with just HTML. Before the advent of CSS, decent web design tricks comprised of images and tables. This trick is actually still being used today and I still see them when I visit certain Japanese video game sites.

Yup, Rio is right. You could make a decent web page using table and image. In fact, that's also what I teach to my student. People was able to make good looking sites before the advent of CSS, so why now they couldn't? Of course, without CSS, it's just a bit more complicated and time-consuming (if you want to make a good looking page).

You also could use frame instead of table in some occasion (but table is still very important). But I don't really like frame since it could easily lead to error and confusion.

EDIT:
But yes, there's no reason for you not to use CSS (or Javascript or PHP) when you can. When I really dead serious making a website (eg: when I'm paid making one), I use all HTML (obviously), CSS, Javascript, and when there's a database involved, PHP.

BTW, I'm using Dreamweaver when making a web page. Anyone know better software of the same kind? I use it for years since I just don't know any better one.

I will concede that most things one wishes to do in a basic layout can be done through straight HTML, but I will not concede that a) there is a subset of things which HTML alone simply cannot do and b) CSS is a much more elegant and efficient way to control stylistic aspects of a layout.

By way of analogy, consider: could you build a house without screws? Probably. Nails can generally do the trick. But what you're left with is more work on your end, as you must find workarounds to replace each silly goose, and a less-stable house, as the nails do not quite fit the job they must fill. This is analogous to the situation we're considering, namely: can you build a website without CSS? Yes, you can, but you have to do all sorts of ugly, repetitive code to accomplish what you want.

For example, consider if we want our H1 tag to have 20 pixels of margin below it. With styles,


But if we're abstaining from styles? Most likely, you'd just say, "silly goose it, whatever the default is looks fine." And that's part of my point: HTML is not as expressive as CSS. You either trade off precise control, or do something like:



I'm not saying that there's anything wrong with tables, or that everyone should start using layers only and never touch specialized HTML elements again. Tables have unique properties that can make them the best choice for some layouts (e.g., multi-column layouts where one column is fixed-width and the others need to stretch... or stretchable layouts in general). But if you look at the current W3C HTML specifications, you'll notice that most stylistic HTML attributes are being deprecated en masse, with the notice "Deprecated. Use styles instead." There is no good reason to do in clunky, repetitive HTML what can be done in CSS.


Frames should really only be used in cases where your users aren't particularly interested in aesthetics (because, aesthetically, there's very little to recommend frames). For example, enterprise web applications often use frames, because they make developing a persistent UI a little easier and their users don't care if the site looks good or not.

Though, AJAX and similar technologies have started to make frame redundant... given that you can, with modern JS frameworks, essentially make any DIV into a frame, and DIVs are lot nicer to work with than frames.



Edit:

Dreamweaver is probably the best software of its type; I used it back when I worked in ASP web development. Just keep out of design mode; the code it generates tends to be pretty bad.

For your students, if you're looking for a free alternative, you could try KompoZer (http://kompozer.net/) -- it's similar to Dreamweaver and open source (i.e., really free). It's made by Mozilla, the same people who make Firefox.

I think Dreamweaver is the best though it could be improved some more. I'm surprised you don't use Notepad. Dreamweaver (and before it was discontinued, Frontpage) add extra tags or leaves the tags within the HTML.

@ tsathoggua
I think you're taking the debate the wrong way. The question was never "Which is better? Just HTML or HTML with CSS et al?" The question was "Can you make a decent web page with just HTML"? My answer to that was "Yes". Your answer was "No". I agree that when designing web pages, you are better off using at least HTML, CSS, and PHP just because it's so much easier to maintain and design with them on the fly than with just HTML itself.

@Rio: I suppose the question is poorly phrased, then, because one could define a white page with a single quote in the middle of it as a "decent" web page, and then clearly pure HTML can satisfy the condition. But if we define "decent" as, let's say, implementing some template from templatemonster.com, then I very much doubt that pure HTML can replicate the precise margins and styling needed.

What I've really been arguing, though, and what's more germane to the thread as a whole, is that, if anyone (e.g. Slurpee) is starting out and learning web design, they shouldn't ignore CSS and learn only HTML, even if HTML could be wrangled into doing what they want. But, I think we agree on that point.

@Rio: I use Notepad for the half-first semester and then Dreamweaver for the rest. Now that reminds me of when I was in college, where I must build a nice looking web page, using notepad only. A nightmare (since it have lots of tables and images).

Notepad++ is the best web development tool.

We use Notepad++ when learning PHP, but we can't use it when we're learning HTML. Perhaps so we try hard to memorize all those HTML tags (since we can't open any book in the test).