transient-mark-mode broken in CVS and is there a better html-mode?

[Shug Boabby]

has anyone else noticed that 'transient-mark-mode' no longer highlights
selected areas in html-mode? seems ok in other modes, such as elisp and
text only.

i'm actually quite sick of the out of the box html-mode that comes with
Emacs... can anyone recommend a better one? one that will allow
indentation. optimally being able to detect javascript/php and change
accordingly (in the same document) but i remember trying to set that up
before and it never worked.