My motto: "If it's documented, it can be dealt with!"
I love it to manually generate web pages, because if you get that working, you know that you have achieved something.
- I code pages in XHTML (you cannot produce tag soup and still have it displayed). When that renders, you know that the document is syntactically correct.
- To improve accessibility ARIA is a must.
- JavaScript is a great asset in improving a page's usability.
- CSS is usable in many ways. Several goodies can be implemented just by using sophisticated CSS schemes.
- I prefer Perl for generating dynamic content. /cgi-bin isn't dead yet!
- SSI is a great way of plugging dynamic content into pages that are otherwise static.
Although I have learned quite a bit by now, I wouldn't dare call myself a pro. There's still enough that I have to learn in this matter.