I'm now in the process of applying for the diploma course. Even though I'm not enrolling for "web programming" it seems that everything is about web programming anyway. When the tutor mentioned the trend, I realised how true it was: look at Microsoft's outlook.com. If you right-click a folder it brings up a custom menu, instead of the generic "back / print / view page source" stuff. Outlook is an application running in a browser.

Not just Outlook but the trend of using web technology is getting huge. There are web apps for 3D modelling, Photo editing, DTP, Banking, Finance etc.. Also a lot of windows desktop .exe apps are now just using web technology in an executable wrapper.

I always wondered why PHP and Javascript seemed uninteresting to me, it's because you need a database to go with those languages,

This is where a lack of formal comping education starts to show. Strictly from a computer science background any non trivial computer program requires a database (or indeed is a database). A database is just a term to mean a collection of data so it doesn't just have to be SQL or JSON. In an unreal engine game for example, the map you produce is actually your database.