Is there a practical reason to learn xhtml still? Should I learn to make my webpages in xhtml instead of html5 still or does it matter?
if I want to learn to build web pages, should I bother with xhtml, or go straight to html5?
html5;xhtml
If you are new to HTML then you need to learn the fundamentals of HTML first before diving in to HTML5 (which is to some extents still a moving target). Why? Because nearly every web-site, tutorial and example code you will encounter regarding HTML will be written in HTML4 or XHTML. You can only really understand the problems that HTMl5 is addressing by first understanding HTML4 and XHTML.If you hope to work as a web-developer or designer then you won't be able to avoid encountering legacy code - so you need to at least understand it and be comfortable with what it is doing. Unfortunately you'll find that the web and standards are often two different things - for many years HTML has been a mess because of the way different browsers have interpreted (and often blatantly flaunted) the standards. So, at the very least, you need to be aware of this.