In the olden days you used 1x1px transparent gifs for margins. You could also use table cell spacing and padding if you were going all out on tables. Another c

In the olden days you used 1x1px transparent gifs for margins. You could also use table cell spacing and padding if you were going all out on tables. Another common hack was a fixed width table with a text-align=right attribute inside a single center tag. This gave you a fixed width content area (inside the table) that was centered in case the user's window was wider than your design's intended width. As far as an exciting time, the state of the art advancing was great but there were a lot of limitations. HTML and browsers rapidly advanced but people didn't necessarily jump on those updates. There was also a lot of divergence between the specs and implementations. Reliable layouts targeted the lowest common denominators between different browsers.