Storing, formatting and displaying data

Hi all, I would like to create a program that allow users to insert text into a database, than that text to appear in a web page formatted as HTML. It is simple to replace the end of line with <br />\n in order to format that text as html, but I don't know how I could let the users to create bulleted lists, tables, etc. Lets say that the users are admins that I can trust, but they don't know HTML at all, however, they want to insert a table, or a list, etc. Are there any solutions for this? I am thinking to something like inserting <table> COL1##COL2##COL3 CEL1##CEL2##CEL3 </table> ...for the tables, or something like that, then to make the program transform this in a true table. But maybe there are better solutions. Thanks for any ideas. Teddy