In part one, we looked at how to create your own web pages, using basic HTML markup tags, and how to include images, links and headings in your documents.

Take a look around the World Wide Web, and you'll see that there's still a lot more that you can do with your pages, like lists, images, or even forms that people can fill in with information.

In this part we'll look at a few other ways in which you can make your pages easier to read and more fun to use, and take a peek at some of the more advanced things you can do if you have access to the right sort of web server for your documents.

Ready to play

All the tags that we've looked at so far have an important thing in common; they're all used to tell the web browser that reads the page not how it should look, but which style to apply - rather like a style sheet in a word processor. Change the style sheet, and everything using that style changes automatically.

Sometimes, though, that's exactly what you don't want. For instance, if you're giving detailed instructions to someone, you might want to move on to a new line at a particular place, rather than rely on their web browser choosing for you. For things like that, you can use the <br> tag, just like you'd use the Return key in a word processor.

But what if you want to do something a little more detailed, like a table of prices and part numbers for a catalogue? There are two ways to do that. One is to use the table feature built into HTML - which we'll look at next month - and the other is to use 'pre-formatted text', like this

<pre>
This text
will appear
exactly like this
</pre>

Most graphical browsers use a fixed-space font (like Courier) to display pre-formatted text, which means that you'll be able to space words out using tabs and be sure that they line up properly. And even though the tag is for 'pre-formatted' text, you can still use other tags within it, to make column headings appear in bold text, for example. If you wanted a table of prices and products, for example, it could look like the example below.

<pre>
<b>
Item Cost
<b>
Roses &#163;1.50
Poppies &#163;0.75
</pre>

The '&#163;' is another special code that you can use in your web pages. It tells the web browser to display character 163. In this case, it's the £ symbol. You can include other special characters, either by giving their name, or by using a special code. For example, &#lt inserts the 'less than' symbol, which you can't type directly into your HTML as it starts each tag. The most useful symbols are listed in the screen at the end of this part.