check out www.richinstyle.com for a really good into into css and www.bradsoft.com for a good demo tool.
The problem with html is that that's what most languages have to generate to get "stuff" on the page. PHP might be great but at the end of the day it's job is to generate html for a user to see.
When you get more experienced you can look at xml and other tools and rethink your opinion of html but the html must come first.
try putting this in a plain html doc - take out the code tags if you can see them
<code>
<style>
h1 {
color : Fuchsia;
font-family : sans-serif;
font-size : 100pt;
}
</style>
<h1>Hello World</h1>
</code>
Normally you would place the style bits in the head section but for this example place the lot in the body section of your html page.