You have learned about the most common HTML tags and are now able to build basic web pages. That's great! But before we move on to learning the bells and whistles of styling webpages, we have two more useful techniques to learn.

While your designs thus far have been basic layouts, you'll find as things grow more complex, it will be useful to leave yourself—and others—notes on what certain sections of code do. HTML and most other computer languages have this capability. These coded notes are known as comments. In the following pages, we'll discuss when comments are most handy and how to avoid abusing this feature so that it doesn't do more harm than good.

After that, you'll learn about what to do when you need specific text characters that aren't available on your keyboard. With coding combinations called ampersand notation, you'll be able to add characters to your webpage text. Why would you want to do that? These characters allow you to improve the presentation of writing, to add accent marks required in certain languages, and to write out mathematical equations.

Both of these techniques fall outside the typical tag format most of HTML adheres to. But both are also great ways to add finishing touches to your written content, and they make the meaning of your content as clear as possible.