Assuming you're running some flavor of unix, you should probably create a group and put both yourself and the apache user (whatever that is, use 'ps aux|grep httpd' to find out) in that group and change the ownership to that group with: chgrp grpname /var/www/html, then use chmod to set it to be readable and writeable by the two of you, and no one else, with something like: chmod 775 /var/www/html or wherever the files live.
