Pro tip: a coworker at lunch in Tulsa argued that table layouts were the real 90s art form, and now I can't pick a side

Cameron Thompson · 2026-10-17T11:40:03.563574+00:00

We were eating at a diner on 11th Street last Tuesday when he brought up that old sites built with tables and spacer GIFs took way more skill than anything made with CSS. His point was that lining up a 3-column layout by hand in 1998 forced you to actually understand spacing, and modern sites just cheat with auto margins. I pushed back that tables were a mess to edit and broke on half the browsers, so the CSS crowd still wins on sanity. But then he pulled up a Netscape-era page on his phone and honestly the thing held together fine at 25 years old. Where do you all land, was hand-coded table layout real craft or just a pain we all put up with?

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Pro tip: a coworker at lunch in Tulsa argued that table layouts were the real 90s art form, and now I can't pick a side | 90s Web Design - Pinecone Attack