I am completely redoing my personal site, just because it's time for a little change. It's been the same for nearly three years, and instead of changing the colors a little bit and moving things around, I'm starting from scratch so I can do it right. I need some help though.

I've been fooling around with HTML for about 5 or 6 years now, but I've never been neat with it. Sure, I indent my tables and everything fine, and I have no problem finding what I need in my own code, but I want to code right. Not only that, but I want to be fully compliant. I read up on how to be XHTML compliant, and that's what I'm aiming for. It won't be too hard, as I've always done most of the things that make it more strict anyway. I always write tags in lower-case, put quotes around my values, and close tags properly. The main difference is that now I'll be writing different empty elements (<br />).

So, I've read up on the DTD stuff (I assume I'll use "transitional"), and now I want to know what I need to do to be fully HTML 4.01 compliant.

Lastly, I need to know a couple PHP things. First the large one: how do I do this "page creation on the fly" thing. I don't really understand it.

The other thing I want to know is just a code thing. I was wondering if there is a way for a page to know where it is on the server, or the address it's at. For instance, I want a page that's loaded to know which directory on my site it is in.

Thanks, I know this is a lot, but I'm just starting this whole process over and I want to do it right this time. This is what happens when you learn HTML by starting with Frontpage . Don't worry, I only used it for a few months, but I've been trying to correct myself ever since.