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On the other hand, the sites still renders perfectly 14 years later.

It would be interesting to see how today's super-fancy-html5 javascript-everywhere no-tables Websites look in 14 years with a modern browser.

All the "terrible" techniques you mention actually do the job in a surprisingly time-robust way.

Engineering versus hype.

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THIS. THIS. THIS. THIS. A MILLION TIMES THIS.

The source code is awful and crappy, but 14 years later it still renders.

Also if you save the page and load in the browser it will still load correctly.

this might also be an artifact of the development of browsers -- IE was a dominant force until relatively recent times, and browsers had to standardize what existed, then build carefully on top.

It may be the case that the techniques used were particularly robust, but it may also be the case that we've striven to keep them unbroken.

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