Notice how many of these hacks grew out of what was called the "pixel perfectionist" crowd in those days. The Web and HTML came out of a community that valued l

Notice how many of these hacks grew out of what was called the "pixel perfectionist" crowd in those days. The Web and HTML came out of a community that valued logically, semantically organized content. Communication was largely about words and ideas. If the result looked about as exciting as an academic paper, well, that was fine. The adoption by a community concerned with communicating with design, using color, layout, and other visual elements, came with a host of ways to squeeze it out of the limited capabilities of HTML. Notice also how many of the hacks were about making it the design look the same in IE as in Netscape. Or in some cases, making it just work, at all, in IE while not breaking in Netscape or Opera or other browsers. One could argue that this mix of competing rendering engines led to a great deal of creative discovery that drove future developments, and today we have, essentially 3 engines: Chromium, WebKit, and Quantum (formerly Gecko)