Yeah, I remember the perl days back in ~1996/97. I didn’t know the first thing about programming (still in high school) I was already coding basic HTML so I said what the hell and I picked up a book to try and learn. I think when I got to chapter three and they started covering regular expressions I said fuck it and started learning PHP (which at that time was PHP/FI).

But back to the thread, yeah, I would learn XHTML and CSS before venturing too far into the backend programming, you really should understand the client side first if your going to be writing web applications.