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I'm not exactly sure what I can or can't do with HTML. For example, could I write a code for an online petition with it?

yep. you can do all kinds of stuff with HTML. i took webdesign my sophomore and junior years. too bad the teacher focused on Flash (which i had, and still have no interest in) so i didn't learn much HTML. try googleing HTML help, or HTML tutorials, or even searching eBay or Goodwill for HTML books and reference guides

all i remember now is the basic stuff, but if you need some help i can try to help you out. just PM me or something.

Roth might be more help than me though

An online petition would appear, most likely, as an html form. I would imagine the tags used most would be the text and submit, although, several others could be used.

As campkill said just google it and you will find many useful tutorials. Keywords you may want to try are: html code form

As far as I know, the problem would come up when you want to do anything with the user supplied data. You would most likely want to pass the data to a script (php, cgi,..). This way you will be able to save the data as you see fit, rather than losing it all on the next page load.

You can check where any site sends it by view sourcing the page, then looking for the <form> tag which may look like this:
<form method=post action="/cgi-bin/sign_petition.cgi">

the stuff in the tags is basically like this, but you can find better answers about that in tutorials.
action="Where to send user/data", the method=post means that the user will not naturally be able to see the data being sent.

goodluck.

I'll try searching for tutorials... it should only be a simple program, so it shouldn't be hard to figure out.

No it shouldnt' be difficult, in fact you could find code already written that people are offering up for people.

Also, I believe there are a lot of petition hosters online if you didn't want to build your own.

One thing to make sure is that whatever route you go for a scripting language is to make sure your host supports, especially if it's free hosting. I think when I used anglefire they offered cgi...it's been about 4 years though.

I use PHP for scripting and it's a breeze.(but that's with a substantial amount of programming knowledge already) however, i do believe it's easily picked up for most people.

I use php on the bestgames page i have, it uses a database for storing info

It has a very simple form, well, two, each button is it's own form. and that is it, however, the button always changes it's text.

It's a freewebs account (I'm cheap), so I can just paste html coding into the site.

yeah, but what he's saying is not all free hosts support cgi, which is what you need for the data people enter in the form to save. i know Geocities doesn't support cgi. you might want to check the FAQ section on Freewebs to see if they support it or not, or you could try contacting the manager or adminstrator or whatever