12.1. Introduction

When designing for the Web, developers historically have used hacks and workarounds due to browser limitations.

The mid-1990s saw a proliferation of such workarounds, among them single-pixel GIFs, font tags, and nested tables, to name just a few. Although the CSS2 specification became a recommendation back in May 1998, only recently have browser vendors fully implemented the standard in their products. This gap in time of browsers without CSS support to browsers with full or near-perfect CSS implementation means a handful of the browsers that most people use has poor CSS support.