This is the new web, breakthrough capabilites of recent web browsers that enable great design without extra graphics or plugins. Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allow us keep the styled presentation of your website separate from it's content.
Back-end server magic that brings complex websites down to size. mySQL (the database) and php (the server scripting language) are what lets us deliver 1700 different photographs using just a single html page; an onine catalog of 15,000 items; or a website that changes style depending on the time of day.
The same magic that php performs on the server happens in your browser with JavaScript. JavaScript is what allows interaction on your page. JQuery is one of the most popular ways to program JavaScript.
Once upon a time we used Flash in every website, sometimes the entire website. With improvments in browser technology (html5 and CSS), most things we used to build in Flash we can now do in pure html.
There are still some things we use Flash for, such as Slide Show Pro, a Flash plug-in for Photos and Video.