Literally why I started HTML and then into programming. Had to do those sick absolute position overlays on the club pages of Neopets.
Myspace also got a number of people playing with HTML and CSS if I remember correctly. It’s been years. Not sure CSS is actually even used anymore. I enjoyed web design classes back in the 2000s. Macromedia still owned Dreamweaver and it wasn’t all that great, so I could still do better by hand. I haven’t played around with any of it in years now, but I assume those programs have GUIs that blow away anything that can be written in notepad like back then.
If you’ve never trouble shot 100 pages of JavaScript in notepad because you didn’t have access to other tools, you haven’t had “fun” before. …fucking nightmare. Find out you put an extra space somewhere.
The better you got though you’d narrow down finding those errors quickly, and then eventually find out a fucking free program will color code the shit and tell you to look at line 232 because it doesn’t make sense
I made an entire syllabus for my high school using on mouse over effects and drop downs with course descriptions, prerequisites and mappings for all future courses/paths. That was around 2005 or 2006. I didnt bother with Dreamweaver because how frustrating it was. Wrote the entire thing by hand using notepad. I don’t even think I did it for a grade, it was just me being so sick of us not having a proper syllabus that you could access online. Just printed copies that would say you need to have this prerequisite, but it didn’t list what page that other course was on so you had to flip around all over to find it and then figure out what prerequisites were needed there. Got so frustrated I just made my own.
When we were going to move into a new place a year later or so my girlfriend at the time and I were trying to figure out what furniture we wanted or how we would want to situate things to fit in our new place. We couldn’t visualize what each other were saying well and know if desks/dressers what not would fit where we wanted. Thus I opened my old web pages, took the blueprint map for the apartment and created a quick drag and drop web page where you could take each item with a name on it and drag it into rooms, place them all where we wanted and then she could play with it and see what didn’t fit side by side due to size, and screen shot what she liked/didn’t like. Having previous projects put together and being able to just copy previous scripts, probably took me 45 mins to throw together. Settled all issues of “that probably won’t fit” and let her play with it when I was at work.
Overkill, possibly… but it was fun at the time (The syllabus took a long ass time, but that had intentions of the school being able to use it off their website to allow students/parents help plan their own futures)
CSS is still used. Modern web toolkits like bootstrap and tailwind can reduce or eliminate the need to write CSS explicitly. Some tools like Sass extend CSS. They all generally produce regular CSS that gets read by the browser.
CSS is still used.
Modern CSS is pretty different to MySpace-era CSS though. Floats are practically never used any more, absolute positioning is a lot rarer than it used to be, and flexbox and CSS grid have made making page layouts far easier. There’s also many things we can do with pure CSS now that used to require JS.