This isn’t my first time reading this, but figured it might be a fun read for folks. I love a good lore dump. I was around for the start of this, but fell off the wagon around 2002.
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The Space Jam case study was really interesting. I hadn’t made the connection that it predates CSS. Cool to see how much screen layout you can get out of asymmetric tables and imagemaps.
…Not only that, but it’s a static page ending in
.htmrather than.html, because people on Windows versions before 95 were still beholden to 8.3 filenames.
That’s the reason why?? I just assumed someone forgot to call it a language when they made the standards 
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oh wow I remember a lot of that stuff! Couldn’t have pulled it all out to write something like that, but as I read, it’s unearthing old memories. Oh frames and tables for layout, LOL those were the days.
I remember the complexspiral demo and being completely blown away by it! And the CSS Zen garden. Those were amazing.
And I remember the absolute disaster that was IE. Glad I wasn’t being paid to do web dev, so I could just decide to use standards and ignore IE.
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This is amazing! I didn‘t know about it. I‘m reading the whole thing and am fascinated. I love stuff like that.
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Oh man, that comment about what people did before border-radius came along? The answer is tables. Tables where you put the rounded corners in an image, and rotated it three times to make each corner, with the content in the middle. I made SO MANY of those. I do not miss that chore 
This article brings back so many memories. Web safe colors and coding specifically for IE! It was wild.
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This was a great read. The janky layout code from around 2008 still infects my brain from time to time. It’s amazing to see how far we’ve come!
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I quite enjoyed this read, thanks for sharing! I’ve only known new css so it’s cool to see how people made do with far less features.
What’s interesting to me is to learn that some of the things I use for layout on my site are considered outdated even though I learned css relatively recently (2021+), like using float for layout and the .clearfix trick.
Whats also interesting is that the author mentions that she wished she could style the label of a checkbox when it is checked, even mentioning :has() and that it doesn’t quite work yet. I then realized the post was made in 2020, so I think she’d probably be happy to know that you can use :has and :checked to style the label for checkboxes quite easily now ^^
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There are a lot of really bad and/or outdated tutorials out there, so this isn’t super surprising. To my knowledge there isn’t a definitive guide to good modern css. On top of that, flexbox and grid, while powerful, are intimidating to newcomers, so beginner sites end up with a wide mix of different techniques to achieve things that are pretty simple in modern CSS.
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Whoa, this is an incredible writeup. I thought from the title that it was just gonna be a tour of new CSS features like nesting, but it’s an entire history of CSS with lots of details on what came before, too.
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