Comment by JimDabell

> whatever page generator they were rendered the page as HTML tables (this was fine back then), and added repetitive style tags to every table cell instead of using CSS

Apart from the fact that very few people understood CSS back then, there was a stupendous amount of really weird bugs. For instance, I remember having a simple th { font-size: … } rule, and some versions of Netscape 4 somehow managed to apply the font size to all <th> cells except for the third one. So workarounds like extra style attributes were added to fix things like this.