Killer Web Sites: nested tables and spacer GIFs

In the beginning, the Internet was primarily a medium for academics, researchers, and the military to share information. However, it didn't take long for entrepreneurial visionaries to realize that this new medium was ideal for selling everything from fresh produce and dogfood to used cars and streaming sports coverage.

However, as with any medium in its infancy, the early Internet was aesthetically ‘crude’ (and not really all that enticing to consumers) until David Siegel published his landmark book, which offered some brilliant workarounds for the limitations of existing browsers and W3C specs circa 1997. (We're talking Netscape 2 and 3, folks.)

These workarounds were so brilliant, in fact, that they are still the most prevalent method of laying out Web pages today.