JWood
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Well, there's actually quite a few things that make XHTML special. First, XHTML is eXtensible, which means you can add tags with very little pain. Why would that matter? Because when you want to display vector graphics or mathematical formulas on a webpage, HTML won't cut it. You'd have to use graphics to do it... but there are already extensions for XHTML that let you simply express yourself mathematically. Also, XHTML can easily import information from current XML documentation. Many companies use XML documents to work with information internally, and being able to make use of that information easily is a wonderful thing. Codewise, XHTML adds just a few things to HTML 4.01 Strict. You change your DOCTYPE to XHTML, add the xmlns, lang, and xml:lang attributes to the opening <html> tag, and make sure all tags either have closing tags, or add a space and a / (front slash) to empty elements (ie, <br /> instead of <br>, <img src="thisisapicture.jpg" /> in the place of <img src="thisisapicture.jpg">.) Also, you need to make sure all element names are written with lower case letters (<IMG> isn't allowed), and that attribute values are surrounded by double quotes and have values. Finally, you can't use the ampersand (&) as a character in your HTML, because it's used to define entities (special characters, mostly.) So, to correctly display "Welcome to C&C Machining's Website", the code will read "Welcome to C&C Machining's Website". Why do all this work? Because you're future-proofing your code. As a web designer, you should be checking your pages in different browsers already. Some browsers don't do well with XHTML, but they're just as likely to display HTML differently anyway. I hope that helps some. A great resource for working your way through HTML and XHTML is Head First HTML with CSS and XHTML from O'Reilly. Amazon's selling it for 22 bucks, and it's more than worth it. We used it as a textbook... but it's like no textbook I've ever seen. It takes the concept of "Learn X in Y Days" books and succeeds.
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I personally use a freely available Notepad replacement called "xint." It color-codes your HTML, so you can easily see when you forget to close a tag. Dreamweaver is great for advanced users... but it instills bad habits in novices. Also, it's prohibitively expensive for beginners. I can, however, recommend a great book for beginners. It's called Head First HTML with CSS & XHTML. Notepad, xint, Dreamweaver, whatever... it'll help tremendously. It's well written, and it's not too expensive at all.
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My Favorite? Konqueror. Until I get Slackware installed? Firefox is what I use in Windows. For testing? Firefox, IE6, IE7, Konqueror, and Safari when I can track down one of my Mac-bearing cronies. I'll eventually bother getting Opera working too.