Ok for starters, HTML is client side based. All the code is turned into a page by the clients browser. Whereas the VB.Net is server side, The code is parsed on the server, Creating HTML code and then sent to the client. Because it's on the server you can do all sorts with VB.net, ASP.net and PHP. These are all Server side scripting languages. You can connect to databases and retrieve data, And HTML cant do this because of security issues.