Html has several tag pairs tags for this purpose:

code, kbd, pre, samp, tt, var

code is an inline pair of tags used to show computer code

kbd i an inline pairs used to represent keyboard input.

HTML and CSS Syntax (Toggle Plain Text)

 <kbd>C:> diskcopy a: b:</kbd>

<kbd>C:> diskcopy a: b:</kbd>

pre is for preformatted text. It is a block version of code

HTML and CSS Syntax (Toggle Plain Text)

 <pre>
 for i=1 to 10
   print i, a[i]
 next i
 </pre>

<pre> for i=1 to 10 print i, a[i] next i </pre>

They render everything between them exactly as written, including indenting. It renders as:

HTML and CSS Syntax (Toggle Plain Text)

 for i=1 to 10
   print i, a[i]
 next i

for i=1 to 10 print i, a[i] next i

samp is inline for printer output

HTML and CSS Syntax (Toggle Plain Text)

<samp>
Account    Total
0001245   $  12.45
0001365   $  67.21
0002435   $   0.00
</samp>

<samp> Account Total 0001245 $ 12.45 0001365 $ 67.21 0002435 $ 0.00 </samp>

tt is for teletype in a monospace font

var is inline for a variable

All of these are in the xhtml standard as well as the html.
samp shows printer output.

For the 'special characters' you might want to try escaping them into HTML entities; or using a different page encoding.

If you don't have too many 'special characters' you can escape them as according to the following table:

http://www.htmlhelp.com/reference/html40/entities/

(There's 3 page of tables [lots of special characters])

If you need to change the encoding (you're using a non-latin character set and, in that case, you have loads of 'special characters') check this out ..

http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/charset.html#h-5.2.1

I'm not sure about the HYPERLINK question.

I think I misunderstood your original question.

If you're output when viewing a page in the browser is plain text (i.e. not formatted at-all as HTML), then there's a couple of potential reasons:

- the page isn't saved with an extension that maps to the HTML mime type (*.html, *.htm are good choices; *.txt is not). EDIT: if your page is created from a VB.NET application, ignore that reason.

- the page is being sent with an incorrect Content-Type header (a correct Content-Type is text/html, a bad one is text/plain)

Do you have an accessible (online) version of the page?

I think I misunderstood your original question.

If you're output when viewing a page in the browser is plain text (i.e. not formatted at-all as HTML), then there's a couple of potential reasons:

- the page isn't saved with an extension that maps to the HTML mime type (*.html, *.htm are good choices; *.txt is not). EDIT: if your page is created from a VB.NET application, ignore that reason.

- the page is being sent with an incorrect Content-Type header (a correct Content-Type is text/html, a bad one is text/plain)

Do you have an accessible (online) version of the page?