The meaning of CSS life...

Question

The one good thing:  I finished my first fee-for-service CSS website done in Dreamweaver CS5.  It is only four pages and is ugly beyong words and displays wildly in various browsers.  The customers are naive enough to have settled for it but their check hasn't arrived yet.  We shall see.
Now the test...I am a school webmaster and my behemoth, changes every week, 50 page sites are coming due.  Oh dear!  Just a word to you Adobe folks:  You are really nice but you do know, don't you, that educators all over the country have begun cursing you every day since the advent of CS5 that offered us few legacy options?  NO ONE in my county school webmaster group can work CSS or CS5.  Deciding that this is an undertaking for the young, we convened our brightest tech students, the ones who understand everything.  They couldn't work the new CS5/CSS editor either. I've been told that every school in the county has dropped web design from tech classes because of this. Just thought Adobe would like to know.  Microsoft Word is the industry standard in its category, just like Dreamweaver. I have a master user's certificate in Word and can make it do great things.  But my 75 year-old father can use it straight of the box, too.
Us all being partners in crime and whatnot, I asked repeatedly on this forum for a usable alternative to CS5, which is no longer a viable tool for the "casual user," as one recent poster pointed out.  That's okay.  I'm happy not to be a pro.  But only AFTER my people saw no option other than dropping $800 on the education version of Creative Suite am I told about Adobe Contribute.  Can that really simplify web design?  Maybe I need to return this spanking new copy of CS5. More information would be helpful.  Until I read Nancy's posts earlier, I had never heard of Contribute.
That said, damned straight on learning the only game in town, I still continue to struggle with CS5/CSS and will post my questions....
Question 1 - I uploaded the first five pages of my large site.  Four of them did not work.
Please view: http://www.alex.k12.ok.us/pto/ptoindex.html.  The content div on this page has suddenly gone black.  I have studiously reviewed the code and have no idea what's wrong.  I rebuilt the page from template three times with the same result.  Funny, Adobe Browser labs shows the site without the black.
Question 2 - Take a look at this page: http://www.alex.k12.ok.us/board/boardindex.html.  I have begun finding ways to convince myself that I am working with tabular data in order to justify using a table.  CS5 still allows that, you know.  The buttons are just harder to get to.  At any rate, the sixth paragraph in the table displays centered in a much larger, bolded font.  It does not display this way in Firefox.  Again, I reviewed the code with a microscope.  I can see no difference between this paragraph and others.  But there are secrets in this CSS life that I do not understand.
Question 3 - A much more generic question only posed because I am using CS5 to create my pages.  I routinely validate my pages using the W3C html and CSS validators.  My CSS has validated 100% of the time.  The HTML validator, however, returns errors, warnings and weather forecasts (a joke) that I cannot reference in my CS5 code.  The line numbers are incorrect and, when I finally find the alleged error, it's NOT THERE.  The most common error I get notes that I have failed to close a paragraph thingy.  You know....</p>.  But when I inspect the code, I find all the necessary structure present.  Deciding I wasn't consuming sufficient mind-altering substances, I tried doing more with the same result.  What does this mean?
Question 4 - I have enough experience with CSS now to know that inserting text in my template causes huge problems secondary only to inserting images.  But i have to have both, and often.  Is is best to just drop an image into, say, the content div,  or should I put the pic in a div of its own?  Most of my pictures have captions, so I am thinking the only way I can make a caption under a photo is to create a div to hold the picture and the caption.  Is there some big secret about this as well?
Thanks for your time.

Answer 1

Wow..
And posted 1 hour ago, 9 viewers and no one concurring except me. Well, I have to congratulate you (I think), you're farther along the CSS road than me, and I started in 1995 with MS Frontpage, back around the time Macromedia owned DW. Does anyone remember going to their site/forums?
I know Cascading is the way to go, I just have no clue, and it seems a near code fiasco, but then I don't know anything about coding so it's all alien. If anyone can believe, I'm still laying a page or two out with tables. I just purely don't have the time to learn CSS. But maybe it's not all that difficult? Well, I haven't started it yet to know I suppose, just seems that it is. Now you say a legacy CSS is somehow not supported, seems that would imply all of those methods/tricks would then no longer be applicable? Wow, just makes me think of MS operating systems. I first started with DOS 3.1, then loaded up what was it, 14 or so 1.44 floppy disks when Win95 came around, then there was NT, I actually have the joke Vista64 running on a machine too.
I understand things move on in software, but if my interpretation is that previous CSS is no longer applicable, for us/those where learning any of it is a challenge, can see the futility in it.. For those of you 13, eating Oreos with milk and already making or about to bring in 10K (or 100K+) a year, good for you. I don't see the majority of people being so determined. And as people get older, they have other responsibilities to attend to. Perhaps software is the next frontier as far as personal computing and the Internet are concerned. AI (artificial intelligence) could greatly assist with this, so as hardware (memory) increases in performance, achieving near parity with the CPU getting cored out, and in the not so distant future when we all have little supercomputers as a result, with Berkeley helping to solve the multicore programming/application issue (that MS awarded 20M to solve, for the future of the OS), then we can most likely look forward to having greater assistance with these types of processes.
Coding.. For us that don't devote so much time to it, it is rather limiting (to our agenda). And the thing is, we really would use these programs more if it was easier, I think I speak for many of us. But if the learning curve goes from slope to vertical, or a series of plateaus, it seems nearly insurmountable at times. And then the browser compatibility issue on top of it all.
Wow. I can say I'm back for one last shot at it now, but if I don't get it this time, I'm outsourcing it. It's been nice, but I simply don't have hours to weeks to invest on a few web pages. And to master it all, I simply don't see it happening, I'm realistic about it. And may I add, I'm not one that is confused by the TV remote or a digital watch, I'm actually very technically oriented, extremely - just haven't been that interested in conquering code (obviously no CS degree, but apparently even those students are cutting corners).
I hear you, and at least I, concur.
Lastly, I'd like to add. Recently while at a bookstore, I picked up one of the computer "Web" editing magazines (I'll read nearly anything, except this - knowing..), mostly because I'm back for another swing at the plate, but also because promimently on the cover was something to the effect "so many tricks explained" etc.. I looked at nearly every article, and don't think I could have done one, they even provided a CD, really? It just seems like a puzzle, and the people that write the articles all looked undernourished, just an observation. Is that really what it takes, so much time and devotion? I wonder if one of them actually comes here and would care to comment on the required time investment (we seem to have time-to-complete figures for SATs etc., why not for articles on this subject matter too? I'd like to know what I'm getting into and how long until I'm up to speed, instead of staring into a void, which is what it nearly seems like. I guess I need to have a conversation with an East Indian Java Guru. Has anyone ever heard an EI programmer even say the word "Java", you just know they get it - I'm in Silicon Valley, happens all the time. Also pass by Adobe HQ all the time and before they even had the buildings (cool power wind vanes too btw, interesting little crosswalk between the buildings, always look for someone in there, like a hamster tunnel thing, funny never see anyone, there was relevance to me stating this) {think I need another parenthesis here, see - wouldn't be good at code}, moving/running on.) Oh, and if anyone needs programming answers, at least here anyway, visit a local Mediterranean restaurant with good falafels, easily find a programmer to answer your questions, no joke). I thought, well, it's good they have their email addresses, maybe I'll contact them and contribute to their 100K a year, but then I thought (seriously), could I even copy and paste the code correctly? Wow.. Is there not a better way, I wonder if Ray Kurtzweil could project out when web editing programs (and the Creators) will benefit from the Singularity theory.
(spell checker would be nice here)
Thx