I could play sounds at you, but the odds are that you have definite ideas about what sounds you want to hear. I could use a fancy background, but that makes text harder to read. The other widely-used nonportable feature is frames. I don't like them, and even if I did I'd be reluctant to use them. I want to put my thoughts on your entire browser window, rather than fencing them up.
Tables are useful for setting up web page formats.
Most of the nicely-arrayed pages you've seen use tables for the setup. The downside is that a table has to be downloaded completely before any part shows up in a browser screen, and that Netscape table layout is slow and unresponsive, at least on the Macintosh. That's the part that renders tables, and is why I'm not using them. I will use Javascript and Java as needed. I have plans for this site that involve Java applets, simply because I can't do what I want to do without them.