This is the answer. Asp.net 1.1 was mostly designed for "drag'n'drop" pixel aligned "form" layouts. Optimised for VB6 devs. Definitely not webby. It wasn't unt

This is the answer. Asp.net 1.1 was mostly designed for "drag'n'drop" pixel aligned "form" layouts. Optimised for VB6 devs. Definitely not webby. It wasn't until Microsoft started with asp.net MVC that asp.net finally started going somewhere properly. And that was ironically much closer to classic asp and "real" web programming than the initial versions of asp.net ever was.