No, people gave twice as much of a care how the website looked, and the tools were basically tables. The bottom line for getting hired as a high-level web designer was "can this person look at 1000+ lines of table markup and be patient enough to figure out how to prevent our email address from going off the page in an 800px browser window".

I only wish. The marketers were in full force. We'd do "slice and dice" design, where a designer would mock up the full page as single graphic in Photoshop, then we'd slice that image into multiple, and reassemble in tables (no reliable CSS!) with font tags.

Today we argue about how much JS is too much, or if there is such a thing, but back then if you wanted the markup to change you sent a request to the backend and rerendered the entire page with the small change you desired.

Loading a page was an exercise in patience, as a first pass on a _decent_ page would get you the text and highly pixelated images, then subsequent passes (and you could watch the screen redraw from the top down multiple times) would reduce the pixelation to LESS BUT STILL pixelated versions.

Some sites were just Word documents that had been "Save as HTML" -> These could be MB of markup, and basically impossible to edit.

Plus, almost immediately, the browser wars began and rather than arguing over how to push the standards, they had none, and just tried to establish their own, incompatible vision.

Basically, once the general populace was the target for content, you were no longer allowed to just worry about the content.