Many years ago I took pride in HTML skills, but that doesn't cut it anymore. What kind of scripting languages are popular these days for somebody who wants to start building web pages?

Flash?

Just a scripting language doesn't cut it for anything remotely advanced. You'll want a framework for building actual dynamic web sites.

PHP: CodeIgniter
Ruby: Ruby on Rails
Python: Django
C#, VB.NET, IronPython: ASP.NET, optionally with the ASP.NET MVC framework
Java/Groovy: Grails
Perl: Kill yourself

There are others, but those would by my choices for the given languages. You'll want to pick something you can get hosting for. Thanks to the Mono project, ASP.NET is not tied to Windows. You can host ASP.NET 2.0 sites on Linux using Mono and FastCGI.

Emon I doubt he's coding the next youtube all by himself..

That's like shooting an ant with a howitzer for what he's trying to do most likely.

I'm not really trying to do anything, I just want to have the skills to build a quality web page should the opportunity to make a buck with it come up.

Do I need to have a server prepared to even mess around or practice with this stuff?

You could just grab one of those free webspace providers (angelfire, megaone, etc) and toy around so you have a general idea of what you're trying to do.

I'd suggest at least HTML and CSS. It all depends on what you're trying to do.

Agh, Flash. No. Just get out. Just leave, I don't want to see you again.

Lets say I want to learn PHP to the level of being able to create something on par with http://jkhub.net/. I don't know if jkhub uses PHP or not, I'm just using it as an example of the type of site I would like to be able to create. Interactive, professional, etc.

Flash really isnt the plague of the internet like most of you make it out to be

Dash if you wanted to learn PHP there are plenty of lessons you can find online, I would suggest this over buying any books to learn honestly. And setting up a WAMP(windows/apache/mysql/php..assuming you have windows OS) can really help your development, and it's easy to setup. here's a good site to get you started, phpbuilder.com

No. it really is the plague of the internet, it just happens to have some genuine uses as well.

I <3 PHP.

hahahaha, professional. That's a good one.

But seriously, yeah, JKHub runs on a PHP backend. But that really doesn't matter - it could have been developed in any of the technologies Emon listed. What matters is that processing occurs on the server side, not what particular language or framework is used to do it. You just have to pick the one you're happiest with.

If you want to go down that route, you'll want to pick a solution that you would be able to run locally - that will mean installing a web server and the framework on your machine. If you go for ASP.NET you can use the VS Web Developer Express edition (free!) which contains its own server so you don't need to install anything separate (although it should be noted that this isn't a full-blown web server, it is meant solely for hosting the web site as you develop it). Other frameworks would need to install IIS or Apache and then the framework.

HTML, CSS, XML, Javascript, PHP, SQL and Flash is generally what I use to build websites these days. Learning the other stuff is also useful as well for more advance websites as well.

So far I've only took classes in Javascript and PHP/SQL but I still need to take official classes in HTML, CSS, and XML in order for me to get my certificate at the college I go to. I mostly focused on Graphic Design at the moment so I'm putting off web design temporary until I complete my AS degree in Graphic design.

As for flash being the "plague of the internet", it can break or make a website. If the entire website is done in flash then that can get annoying but if the site uses flash elements sparing, it can can look just fine. I typically reserve only the title banner of a web page as the only flash element while everything else is done via HTML and CSS.

Learning CSS is important I might add. Formating a look of a web page with just HTML is just poor practice now of days. This is especially important if you are trying to maintain consistency with the style of the site. Also makes it much easier to change the look in a snap rather than going through every web page and changing the same element on every page (assuming the site was created dynamically through server-side script that is).

f.i.x.ed...by I AM SOLGATT

Not necessarily, an increasing number of frameworks come with bundled servers for development purposes. Django has always had a lightweight development server as far as I can tell.

There's also a Python one-liner to start a static webserver serving the directory the process is launched in,

I would highly recommend Ruby on Rails (RoR).

If you want to try out PHP, MySQL, and Apache but don't want to bother with a server, you can always try http://www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html and run a webserver from your local PC.

Two parts to your question. Do you want to build a web page or a web application? There really is a difference. Pages are all "client-side" stuff. They are there to present content. Web applications require a server-side language like ASP.NET or PHP. They process form requests and are more often than not, database-driven.

I, personally, hate "client-side" bling namely because I refuse to touch Javascript. I know people swear up and down by it but when I do var elem = document.getElementById("someDiv"); What type am I returning? I would much rather see DivTag dt = Document.GetByID("someDiv") as DivTag;

Shameless plug: I offer hosting that supports most all of the above methods (PHP, mod_python, ASP.NET via Mono, etc with MySQL) on the cheap.

Anyway, you definitely need to learn XHTML and CSS. XHTML to get browsers out of the horrid old quirks mode, and CSS to give you full control over your site's design.

After that, if you intend to have any dynamic content (most do), then you'll need to take advantage of one of the numerous methods of server-side programming. PHP is generally regarded as the easiest to pick up, but each one has their upsides and downsides.

If you decide to go with Ruby On Rails, you'll probably want to start with Instant Rails. The code is beautiful, you'll get things done quickly & the code is much easier to read/write than languages such as PHP.

I would recommend the Pragmatic Programmers books. All of these are available in PDF as well which makes things much easier (e.g. clicking on links). There are also a ton of free eBooks out there as well.

As others have stated. Just knowing XHTML & CSS doesn't really cut it these days.

Ew @ RoR. People still use that?

Ruby on Rails is filled with too much magic.

There's no such thing as too much magic. Besides, one must still know Ruby to be a great RoR programmer.

lolwut. There is definitely such a thing as too much magic. Because then you start losing control.

Is it weakly-typed languages you don't like or is it dynamically-typed languages you don't like? Strongly-typed languages like Java and C# may give you false sense of security but they do make coding much more tedious and inflexible. If number-crunching performance isn't critical in your app I would always think twice before using one of those languages.

No. You don't need XHTML at all, you just need a doctype.

Having used both Ruby on Rails and Django for a handful of projects each I've reached the following conclusion:

Rails has some nifty features, but it makes the mistake of hiding away functionality such as the request/response nature of how the web works. You should have to go crawling through documentation to find out how to access the request object.

Django's approach is to give you a request object and require that you return a reponse object, everything in-between is entirely up to you. Of course it gives you a hell of a lot of convenience methods, and a very elegant template language, not to mention a pretty good automatically-generated admin application. Rails requires that you spend an obscene amount of time with the documentation to avoid writing really bad code - it makes it far too easy to write inefficient apps. It's slightly slower to get up and running with Django (it doesn't do any scaffolding for you) but after about 10 minutes you'll be good to go.

Rails allowed about 10 times the productivity over Java frameworks (not really an exaggeration), Django allows me to work about twice as fast again.

I do like Ruby as a language, it has a lot of useful functionality that allow you to do some very advanced stuff in a small amount of code, but as a framework Rails does too much magic in the bad way. Good magic is "I wonder if there's already a way to solve this problem so I don't have to do it all myself. Oh, there is, coolio". Bad magic is "So how exactly is this controller method called? Where am I passed the request object? How do I specify a different template? Can I use a different template engine? Do I ever get to see the response object?" ie, they're all questions that have answers and can be done in Rails, but the answer isn't obvious just by looking at the code.

This.

To be fair, the way browsers work now is broken. They don't even look at the doctype, they just read <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ""> and go into STRICT. (Go ahead, I tested it in Firefox3. <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC ""> is all that's required to force the page into standards compliance mode)

But they run on STRICT regardless of what doctype you give, which means you're best off writing in XHTML 1.0, or at least HTML4 Strict.

XHTML 1.1 shouldn't be used in any form at the moment however since it requires a MIME type that IE (and I think Opera also) does not support yet.

There's so much misinformation in this thread sprinkled with corrections.

FLASH SUX

no u

Weak-type languages. Inferred typing in C# is pretty good. In C# 3.0, we get the "var" keyword and inferred typing. So I can do "var myDir = new DirectoryInfo(path);" and "myDir" will be of type "DirectoryInfo". Now I can't go myDir = 5; the compiler will have a hissy fit. There's some argument of which is better inferred or "direct." "var" also does anonymous typing which is what makes LINQ work.

Talking with Emon about typing and he pointed out some good cases of when dynamic typing is beneficial if not less clutter. Runtime casting is one. I know it's a bit of a PITA to force a cast of an object. At the same time, I can see how doing "var x = 5; print x * 10;" and have it still work be confusing esp. to novices.

But yeah, my beef is the weak-type nature of Javascript. The fact that this threw no compile-errors doesn't jive with me

Hey JG given your education and work experience, do you find it easy to understand and use new programming languages/updates? Do they ever come out with something that completely stumps you and you're like "what the f is this I need to go buy one of those massive textbooks'?

Why would you expect that to cause compile-errors? Are you Hitler?

Well, even if everyone hates Flash, I think this website is damn cool.

http://www.2advanced.com/

Really? I always felt that the 2advanced design was very dated and never really that impressive. Certainly there's nothing on the site that justifies it being done completely in Flash.

I don't know, I just like the scifi-ish interface. Everything flows nicely.

Ah, did not know that. The world has moved on since I last looked at this stuff

Yes, half-minute load times are so very cutting edge. And what couldn't they have done there with CSS? Possibly the flickering squares on the image transitions - which look really stupid anyway IMO.