I feel old now.. in 1998, I was 24 and had been working as a web developer for a couple of years. I'd moved on from any thoughts of Netscape server-side dev, and was doing VBScript and JScript in classic ASP. JS was my favorite language back then, though dealing with MS COM collections was a pain.
I remember using the 1x1 graphic a lot, combined with complex tables, and even other stuff. Of course, even before CSS, you could do a lot and at first I really didn't get the point of CSS... I think that IE6, not IE4 was the first good browser. Yeah, it was despised a half a decade later, but at the time it was the best available. IMHO the Netscape 4.0.x-4.2.x was probably the most horrible ever in terms of bugginess and imho solely responsible for IE's dominance.
What we have today, even without the likes of jQuery is SO much better than the mid-late 90's.
God, I started out with Perl-based CGI, NetObjects Fusion, and ATG Dynamo's early JSP implementation, back when being able to afford a SQL backend meant you were hot stuff. Kids today have it so easy. We had to code ISAPI filters, during packet storms, for bidirectional communication! And don't get me started on what we had to do when the bit buckets ran out of ones....
I wrote an Atari 2600 cartridge auction/trading site in perl that was so popular, it caused my company's webserver - a large national ISP! - to slow to a crawl running all the CGI.
This was pre-ebay, about 1995. Wish I had stuck with it in retrospect: ebay started very similarly.
I think one reason for me, is that I am way much better doing pure graphics coding for customs components, than trying to make a component out of <div/> coupled with CSS/JavaScript magic.
I remember using the 1x1 graphic a lot, combined with complex tables, and even other stuff. Of course, even before CSS, you could do a lot and at first I really didn't get the point of CSS... I think that IE6, not IE4 was the first good browser. Yeah, it was despised a half a decade later, but at the time it was the best available. IMHO the Netscape 4.0.x-4.2.x was probably the most horrible ever in terms of bugginess and imho solely responsible for IE's dominance.
What we have today, even without the likes of jQuery is SO much better than the mid-late 90's.