Is HTML/XHTML Still Necessary?

Not entirely, within your markup for the CMS you'll need to understand and use a variety of HTML and CSS to modify and create the desired output from the PHP code. It's also useful when writing blog posts to be able to modify the layout of text and images of a post.

It depends on what you want to do, there are tons of drag and drop systems (such as squarespace) and content management systems that mean that you don't really need to know it if you want to do maintain an existing site or use themes and plugins to make something from "scratch".

However, if you wanting to amend the functionality of a site, change the layout of parts of it HTML or have nicely optimised, clean code; it is an extremely useful thing to learn.

HTML, JavaScript and CSS are binding agents and very basic to web presentation. Eventually it all comes back to these 3 items. Without them then content can't be easily viewed in a browser.

CMS focus more on content and use templates to present the content to the user. The templates merge content (text/data/etc) with HTML, JavaScript and CSS to create the output.

Depending on your desired outcome, you may not need to know a lot about HTML, JavaScript of CSS (or PHP which WordPress uses), but it can help if you know something.

Take care,

fig said:

Not entirely, within your markup for the CMS you'll need to understand and use a variety of HTML and CSS to modify and create the desired output from the PHP code. It's also useful when writing blog posts to be able to modify the layout of text and images of a post.

Click to expand...

That's a sad and pathetic truth.

What developers need to pass on to clients is a fantastic WYSIWYG editor which works more like Word than it does an HTML editor. Easy to use modals that allow drag/drop, resize/crop and text/table/list item formatting or custom styles added by the developer that show up graphically in the editor. Using only class and ID tags, the editor can reproduce the end user rendered layout/look and feel and developers can maintain the semantic web. Combined with a file manager used for image resize/scale/crop and even media query or responsiveness added in via media queries, no knowledge of HTML or CSS should be required.

I can dream, can't I?

Yes, I am aware of CKeditor, Tabula, CKFinder and other cool tools that are common plugins for popular CMS's. Yes, yes. But none of them have all the things we want in a unified package with easy to install plugins for specialized formatting. The kind of thing that hides the source view and is not missed.

Just some thoughts, thanks for listening to me gripe.

It depends on what you want to do, there are tons of drag and drop systems and content management systems.