So, we built our own application to explore the Gapminder data. You learned about the basic setup of a Shiny application and saw a lot of the widgets. It will be important to remember this basic structure because we are going to cover a lot of different territories in this chapter and, as a consequence, we won't have a single application at the end, as we did in the previous chapter, but lots of bits and pieces that you can use to start building your own content.

Building one application with all of these different concepts would create several pages of code, and it would be difficult to understand which part does what. As you go through the chapter, you might want to rebuild the Gapminder application, or another one of your own (if you have one), using each of the concepts. If you do this, you will have a beautifully styled and interactive application by the end that you really understand. Or, you might like to just browse through and pick out the things that you are particularly interested in; you should be able to understand each section on its own. Let's get started now.

In this chapter, we are going to cover the following areas:

• Adding HTML to native Shiny applications
• Customizing Shiny applications, or whole web pages, using HTML
• Styling your Shiny application using CSS
• Incorporating Shiny content within another web page
• HTML templates