1998. Hell, I think I still have this book laying around somewhere. I got it at a book fair in elementary school and from then on out I was always making one stupid webpage or another. Until I discovered Java of course.
I remember using the 1x1 graphic a lot, combined with complex tables, and even other stuff. Of course, even before CSS, you could do a lot and at first I really didn't get the point of CSS... I think that IE6, not IE4 was the first good browser. Yeah, it was despised a half a decade later, but at the time it was the best available. IMHO the Netscape 4.0.x-4.2.x was probably the most horrible ever in terms of bugginess and imho solely responsible for IE's dominance.
What we have today, even without the likes of jQuery is SO much better than the mid-late 90's.
Still after all these years, the scars earned in web development projects, make me jump of joy when I get to do native desktop stuff instead.
It's not nearly as bad as the bad old days so to speak, and a lot of things can be very clean and elegant.
This was pre-ebay, about 1995. Wish I had stuck with it in retrospect: ebay started very similarly.