Personally, in highschool, I was taught HTML (which was...5 yrs ago). Did it in good 'ol notepad. Memorized all the tags and all that good shinanigans. However, industry is currently split between HTML and CSS. Now, the only actual advantage to CSS according to most professionals is that it's easier for a search engine to rummage through your site and pick out your keywords, as it's easier to cascade through beautiful coding instead of bumping around inside of tables. For myself personally, HTML is EASIER just because I know all of it already and have recently gotten back into coding at the beginning of this last college semester for a main course. It's what I'm going to be doing when I leave college, however, the other half of the course in the first semester was CSS. CSS's basics are easy as hell and pretty much just MAKE SENSE. However, it's all buggy and half the time causes bullshit on browsers. [ex. INTERNET EXPLORER
] I have found hacks for those to get those to work. Because it's a cascading style sheet, the basics of CSS is free flowing and relative. As designers, it's not always how we want it to be. We want things to be in a certain spot. Or, absolute. The problem with that, is it can mess up the CSS and then you gotta go and mess around with it. It wants everything to be relative. And I don't. I swear that 99% of emails are still HTML anyway. Like I said, the industry is split down the middle. I wanted to get everyone's take on which they think is better or which they prefer and why.
Also, I'd like to add. I found that for those in my class that have never coded before found CSS easier than HTML when I had the opposite effects. For me it was just how I was taught before, so I knew what I was doing with the HTML part of the course where when we were introduced into CSS I was just as new as the other students. I did pick it up stupid fast though since I knew what everything meant but hadn't had an idea for it's applications. So I say, this could be given great consideration when deciding which you prefer, I think it's just a choice between which you learned first.
Also I haven't given CSS a lot of opportunity yet. So I'm going to try and pump our a couple mock sites this Christmas break. Though I do like CSS more than HTML.
Also, I'm just browsing through the source code for this, and noticing it's about a 3:2 ratio. Html to CSS. Not pure of either. That's probably just the smf though.