I built my first website in 2003 on freewebs.com, and a couple more from 2004-2006. [0] [1] I remember “slicing” layouts in Macromedia Fireworks and Photoshop.

I built my first website in 2003 on freewebs.com, and a couple more from 2004-2006. [0] [1] I remember “slicing” layouts in Macromedia Fireworks and Photoshop. You would draw rulers over the main components, and the program would generate a monstrosity of <table> tags to convert the layout to HTML. It was an improvement over Microsoft frontpage. At that time CSS was largely used for fonts and colors. I even had a feature on one of those websites where you could “switch layouts” by using a different css file with new colors. Then developers started decrying the use of tables for layout, and sites like AListApart (referenced in this article) really pushed for more reliance on CSS. It seemed like we were then stuck in an uncanny valley from 2006-2015 when, even though some browsers supported modern flexbox/CSS3 features, you couldn’t really use them if you wanted feature parity between browsers because so many users were stuck on older browsers due to enterprise upgrade rules. What really improved css, and the web in general, is automatic browser updates. Chrome was the first to implement it and now its commonplace. Not only that, but the security community spent a decade shaming enterprises for rules against upgrading software. Now, finally, it seems like enterprises are realizing the insecure thing to do is not upgrade. It’s an interesting interplay of pressure between chrome/Firefox browser devs and security community that got us to a place where a huge percent of browsers are the latest version. It really can’t be understated how much this trend has helped frontend developer productivity the past few years. [0] http://web.archive.org/web/20040610011616/http://www.mainelobsters.org http://web.archive.org/web/20040610011616/http://www.mainelo... This beauty got me 2nd place in the "maine student web design awards" for middle schoolers! You can see the layout switch if you choose "aqua" or "mid morning breeze". I think I actually implemented it with two different slicing layout. All the images are dead now, but you can see from where they were positioned what slicing used to look like. [1] Ok, so probably nobody cares about this, but I'm enjoying the blast from the past... here was my second site the next year. This one didn't win the competition, which I think was due to my trash talking on the competition forums lol. http://web.archive.org/web/20070104015744/http://www.splitatoms.com:80/sa/tutorials/view.php?id=30 http://web.archive.org/web/20070104015744/http://www.splitat...