Essential Design

History of page design (part I)

I have to admit I've been around the block a few times. I've been designing web pages since before we had tables, or even color in anything but pictures (and those were only in 16 colors). Back then, web pages had a header and paragraphs — all in one big column.

People who were really determined to have a table with columns had to use the "pre" (preformatted) tag, which acted like a typewriter, and put things exactly where you typed them. Since we didn't have colors then, everything was in whatever colors your monitor supported. The pre tag still exists, so I can give you an idea of how we did columns and how they looked back then.

| Column1  | Column2  | Column3  |
| text row | text row | text row |
| text row | text row | text row |
| text row | text row | text row |

Pretty ugly, I'd say. I'll bet you can guess why designers didn't bother to do web pages in columns!

But things soon improved. I'll tell you all about that in the next installment.

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