Very retro with all those <font size="5"> tags, but that's the job of CSS :)
Edit: there was no CSS support in 1.1 :)
Edit: there was no CSS support in 1.1 :)
Like, part of the premise of CSS was progressive enhancement, where just the semantic structure alone would provide an adequate experience with however the browser might choose to render those elements by default. Basically my question is, if the font size tags were taken out and just bare h3/h4/p used instead, would that still render a usable page on Netscape 1.1? Could you then supply font overrides via a <style> tag in the header which could be applied by later browsers?
Obviously it would be a different kind of experiment as the result would no longer be identical across all the "supported" browsers, but might be an interesting comparison point.
"Don't use tables, use CSS!" was a big message. But CSS's tools for tabular layout were extremely poor and difficult to use, leading to much frustration. It was a joke how hard it was to create a simple responsive three column layout in CSS, a thing easily accomplished with tables and very common on the web. Getting that three column layout right seemed like black magic in CSS1.
It was, but in hindsight maybe the message needed to be elaborated more. Perhaps it should've been "Don't use tables for layout, use CSS!"
Besides that, CSS IMO accelerated more complex and visually pleasing websites, and arguably spurned on the Web 2.0 look. Unfortunately, due to the message not specifying the for layout bit, it took a while for many devs to unlearn that tables are bad – tables aren't, they should just be used for tabular data.
It's surprisingly tractable to plug 90s machines into the internet via ethernet adapters or little serial gadgets that can do SLIP or pretend to be hayes modems, but the modern web full of crypto and execution environments that can bring modern computers to their knees is not kind to them.