> * window.status = "awesome"

The discovery of window.status was a landmark of human achievement. Scrolling text in the browser's own UI? Sign me up, I'll take 40.

Remember scrolling text in the title tag? Quite cool, back in the era before tabbed browsers.

* Navigation menu using GIF buttons. Often animated, including the rotating "@" symbol for sending mails

* Creating gradient text using one <font color="..."> for each letter. http://jsfiddle.net/A2VCE/

* Putting text in <noscript> and <noframes> tags to support old browsers

* Add "lowsrc" attribute to <img> because the larger image would take too long to load.

* List detailed hardware specs for the web server on the "about us" page.

* Every site had a guestbook, which was displayed as "some text <hr> some text 2 <hr> ..." etc. Centered, of course.

and wide open to the funkiest XSS you can imagine--boy did that ever blow my mind when someone explained me the idea, I had been coding hardcore JS for years but it never clicked that this would allows you to pwn everything. except my mind went more into practical joke settings "hey I can inject JS and make all links on this guestbook EXPLODE if you click them?? aahaha"

And don't forget 2x2.gif, with the top left and bottom right pixel transparent, and the other two pixels coloured white or grey. Used to make background images of table cells with this, and that would create a faux opacity effect with whatever was used as the background image behind the table.