[CentOS] Is it bad for my web document folder to be user accessible?

PHP and MySQL seem to working on my CentOS installation. I'd like to install phpMyAdmin as well, so I downloaded the necessary files from phpMyAdmin's homepage and copied them to /var/www/html...

... except that's where the process stopped. My regular user account doesn't have permission to write into the /var/www/html folder.

Should I just chmod the folder to 777? Is there a reason it's not already user accessible?

This is a local machine where I'll be testing web pages of my own design, and not accessible from the web.

Or at least I hope not. If I'm running an Apache server just for local files, it's not being seen on the web, is it?

Dave