Bravenet, geocities, tripod are all FREE hosts. None will be better than others. Someone might know of better ones, but these are the more well known ones.
It is XHTML, this is NEW, 'Extensible Hypertext Markup Language' - A reformulation of HTML 4.0 in XML 1.0. XML is really not more difficult to create, but it demands more attention to closing tags and does not work with web browsers with first parsing the data.
No FREE host will permit you to post music on the site, even if it is your own creation. Since everyone is now considered guilty of posting copyrighted materials whether or not you actually have.