What would you think if someone walked up to you and said “I own a building supplies yard, how about you help yourself to the materials and build whatever you can dream of”?

In the case of the Internet, that is exactly what has happened, and it is exactly why I love the whole concept.

HTML is one form of ‘material’ you have at your disposal. All you need is access to a computer connected to the Internet and a basic knowledge of HTML and you can start building!

The whole idea of being able to create something real from materials whose supply is infinite (code written by you) is what excites web designers and developers around the globe. Flickr, Digg, Facebook - they were all dreamed up and then written using the languages available to all of us. The speed at which web applications are being created and updated is largely due to the low barriers to entering the marketplace, relative to offline business.

I’ve done just as explained above – built something I thought of – and have a few more ideas in the pipeline.

As my HTML example (although it also uses a few more web technologies – which I will explain further) I put forward Eventlist.com.au – a website I’ve built which is an Australian Triathlon and Multisport Event Calendar. It’s targeted at Australian athletes who participate in endurance sporting events around the country. I’ve also created a sister site for our kiwi friends – Eventlist.co.nz.

My site uses several web technologies:

• HTML
• CSS
• Javascript
• PHP
• MySQL

HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is used primarily to provide the structure of the site. I have used “div” elements to lay the foundations of each page. As Lachlan Hunt explains in his article “A Preview of HTML 5” for web design site A List Apart, we use “div” elements to structure each page because HTML 4 lacks the ability to semanticly define page structure.

However, this may be a worthy reason for updating the sites code to HTML5, which allows for elements such as “header”, “nav” (for navigation), “section”, “article”, “aside”, and “footer”, eliminating the need to use classes or id references to identify structural elements.

CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) is used extensively to define the style of elements throughout the site. When CSS gained popularity it spawned a creative following that sought to take the artistic style to the web, lighting up what was once a pretty ugly scene. A few of my favourite CSS gallery sites are CSS Zen Garden, CSS Beauty, and CSS Drive.

Javascript is used to do some of the “behind the scenes” work like validating user input, hiding tables of data that must not be visible at a particular time, and occasionally swapping an image when a user rolls the mouse over it.

The whole site however, is run using PHP & MySQL. PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) is a server side programming language which allows you to make dynamic web pages. PHP enhances your HTML code by adding a dynamic element to it, so that the user experiences something that is custom made for them. In the case of my website, when a user searches for an event such as a triathlon, they are presented with a list of search results which have been dynamically created by a PHP script. That script involved querying a MySQL database, checking for all database entries that match the search criteria, and then printing those search results on the screen in the form of HTML. So PHP is basically a way of publishing HTML with an added bit of spice (or interaction).

All in all, HTML is a language that is basic enough to learn in a couple of hours but holds such power that the majority of the Internet as we know it, has been written using it. The difference between much of this HTML is how it has been created.

Since the volume of individual publishers has grown, so too have the number of ways in which you can publish. Hand-crafted HTML is rare, but popular among professional web designers. Mainstream blog software produces the HTML for you, so you don’t have to worry about it. Adding a comment on a blog or news site requires just your own words, the HTML form will write the HTML for you.

As stated earlier, all you need is access to a computer connected to the Internet and a basic knowledge of HTML and you can start building!