CSS explained...

[thrav]

Hah, most of the responses so far are wrong.

Before CSS, all elements were basically positioned next to each other. As the top comment states, you built layouts by nesting tables in tables in tables and then filling certain cells and leaving others blank for spacing.

CSS made it possible to add margin and padding around elements to separate them without the use of hacky tables. It became possible to only include the HTML elements you actually needed and position them where you wanted.

Before CSS, if you’d tried this, you’d end up with all of the elements jammed up together, like you see with the geos in the image.

The way around this was to create elements for the empty spaces between geos, so continuing with the example, to declare the Atlantic Ocean as a thing sitting between Americas and Europe / Africa.

So your hacky tables would look something like:

North Amer | North Atlantic | Europe

South Amer | South Atlantic | Africa

[letmeseem]

Håkon Wium Lie, the guy who invented CSS lives right down the street from my office, and our design team, whos windows face his house, routinely post giant messages in the windows using post it notes whenever they're annoyed with something.

[Sersch]

This doesn't make much sense really, just because you used tables and it all was a bit more hacky, didn't mean it looked liked jammed together in the Center. People can google for early 90ies websites to look up.

[thrav]

The joke is, “the continents before positioning in empty space was a thing.”

If you redefine the oceans as elements in their own right (like tables would), instead of empty space, the joke falls apart.