It was mentioned already, so it will not come as a surprise to you: there are built-in graphics in HTML. You can, for example, have your texts in different colors ("COLOR="). You can have your tables in different background colors ("BGCOLOR="). You can have the borders of a table colored differently ("BORDERCOLOR ="). And so on. There are many graphical features built into HTML.

The advantage of built-in graphics is that they don't need to be downloaded, they are already there in the browser. Consequently they are really "instantly loaded". Of course, they are limited in their graphic functionality. Still, you can combine them, along with your custom elements, to the most amazing graphics.

Even if a visitor has the graphics switched off in the browser, the built-in graphics are still visible. So you can give the visitors visible cues that are always visible.

If you want to know details, refer to a HTML tutorial. A number of them are on the web, for example:

http://members.tripod.com/~chrismartin2/
http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/5345/
http://www.emerson.emory.edu/services/html/html.html
http://www.civeng.carleton.ca/~nholtz/tut/doc/doc.html
http://htmlgoodies.earthweb.com/
http://www.ology.org/tilt/cgh/
http://www.davesite.com/webstation/html/
http://hotwired.lycos.com/webmonkey/teachingtool/
http://htmlprimer.com/

It has a special advantage over all the others. The author, Peter Bremer, has made it easy to download the complete package of some 50 files. After extracting them from the zip-file coming from download you can feed them all in a HTML compiler. A few seconds later you have an ebook, behaving like the web site. This ebook you can have offline in the background, while you are developing your web site.

Speaking of HTML compilers - if you need one, you can download shareware versions from

http://www.webattack.com/download/dlweb2book.shtml
http://www.filewizard.com/index.asp?ID=8776
http://www.davecentral.com/10777.html
http://www.bersoft.com/
http://new-projects.com/booksoft/
http://www.smartcode.com/icour.htm
http://www.mediabuilder.com/softwarewebutil.html