Average Price of UK website designed?

Except that IE6 still doesn't support HTML 4 properly, never mind XHTML.

No it won't. They've discontinued it as a stand-alone browser.

It calls itself a language (look up what "HTML" stands for). It is not however a *programming* language IMO.

So I would not call writing in HTML "programing". I would call it "formatting".

A document can be formatted in plain text, RTF, HTML, PDF etc.

It would not be incorrect to use "coding" in the way you suggest, but IMO "formatting" is a more accurate description, being a less general term. "Coding" implies that the binary representation of the text has been changed, whereas text in any of the above formats is still essentially ASCII representation and could be read in a simple text editor. I might use the term "coding" to describe changing text or a file into a MIME or Base64 encoded attachment, for instance.

That syntax would be reserved for the program or mechanism actually performing the formatting operation - e.g. The document was formatted by "Word" into RTF.

Is this post coded in plain text, formatted in plain text or formatted by plain text?

You are moving into the area of how a particular format is

I use a newsreader that shows everything as plain text. Other newsreaders will look at the HTML. Does that have anything to do with anything?

OK, I'll take a step back!