I was fixing my grandma's old blog and found out something wild about early web code

I was helping my grandma update her knitting blog from 2005, and I opened the page's source code. I saw a ton of weird tags like and that I didn't recognize. I looked it up and found out that before CSS was common, people had to put style info right into every single HTML tag (which sounds like a huge pain). It made me realize how much easier it is to learn now with things separated. Has anyone else had to work with really old code like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_linda22d ago

Oh man, that takes me back. I read an article a while ago about how web developers used to have to nest tables inside of tables just to make a basic layout. The whole thing sounded like a total nightmare compared to how we do things now. Trying to change one color would mean editing a hundred separate tags. It's crazy to think about how much cleaner and easier the code is today. Your grandma's blog is a real piece of internet history lol.

mia_hart9022d ago

Yeah @the_linda, I had to fix up one of those old table layouts for a client once. Spent an entire afternoon just tracking down where one border color was set across like fifteen nested tables. Modern CSS feels like magic after that.

the_mary22d ago

Did they ever use those old spacer gif things for layouts? I heard people used single pixel images stretched out to push stuff around, which sounds even worse than font tags.