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Spent 3 hours trying to center a div in a 1999 Angelfire page and the fix was one tag
I was messing around with an old Angelfire page I saved from 1999 last night, trying to get this one box to sit in the middle of the screen. I tried tables, I tried spacer gifs, I tried every hack I could remember, and nothing worked for like 3 hours. Then I looked at the source again and realized the whole layout was built with a single center tag wrapped around a table. I just put that one tag back where it was and it worked instantly. I felt so dumb because I had been overthinking a page that was built by a 14 year old in 1999. Anyone else run into old pages where the answer was way simpler than the problem you were trying to solve?
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derekp7012d ago
That center tag thing is exactly how it went for everyone back then, and it's actually a good lesson for fixing old pages today. The whole web was built on nesting, so a center tag wrapped around a table was the easiest way to make a box sit in the middle without any CSS at all. When people try to "fix" those pages with modern tricks, they end up fighting the old layout instead of just going with it. The trick is to look at the page the way the kid who made it did, with the simplest tools that existed at the time. Tables inside tables inside a center tag was basically the whole design system in 1999. You could take that same idea and use it on any old page you dig up, just match the era's tools instead of dragging in flexbox and grid.
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