CSS technically came out near the end of 1996, but I don't think it was widely used for layouts until the early 2000s when sites like A List Apart and the CSS Z

CSS technically came out near the end of 1996, but I don't think it was widely used for layouts until the early 2000s when sites like A List Apart and the CSS Zen Garden were advocating against using tables for layout and separating content from presentation. A lot of web sites back then were made by mocking up a design in Photoshop and then splicing it up into a bunch of image files that you meticulously recreated in a grid using tables and spacer GIFs, so transitioning to fluid CSS layouts required rethinking the whole design approach for a lot of people. (I initially only used CSS to add hover color to my links, since that was one thing you could do in CSS that you couldn't do with plain HTML attributes.) "View Source" was definitely the thing that got me into web development and eventually programming in general. That and reading books at Waldenbooks at the mall while my mom and sister were shopping was pretty much how I learned everything back then (since we didn't nearly the wealth of online resources we do today, and the ones we did have weren't as comprehensive as something like MDN). I remember Microsoft's web sites all used VBScript instead of JavaScript back then. I remember seeing Flash for the first time and thinking it was incredible but then being disappointed that it was a binary file format that I couldn't recreate. Like the article author, I've oft lamented how byzantine and opaque modern web sites are to tinkerers thanks to things like CSS preprocessors (which can often lead to complex class webs like the excerpt in the article) and JavaScript minimizers (which, even if you "unminimize" it, strips meaningful symbol names and comments). Granted, there are a whole ton of new ways to learn these things, but there's something to be said for just diving in and seeing how somebody else did it. (Edit: I should note that the CSS inspector and JavaScript debuggers in modern browsers do help bridge this gap.)