"supposed to figure out what his cheapest OR fastest choice of travel is"

Haaahahahahaaaa! I guess your professor hasn't spent a lot of time with the "scheduling" of the NYC subway system. Or, for that matter, knows that there's one rate and transfers are free. Or maybe this is kind of a tongue-in-cheek question ;).

I've never found Dreamweaver to be that bad in terms of producing reasonable HTML, but you don't need it (and I'm not even sure it's really helpful) for this project. I think you could safely go either way.

update: Oh, and there's a secret, by the way. Shhhhhhhh. . . it's "Perl", not "PERL" (not critiquing -- just mentioning something that commonly grates on the nerves of some. . .)