Retro HTML was great! You never had to figure out why your CSS inexplicably wasn't working, nobody complained when things didn't look beautiful, because beautiful was impossible. Bring it back!
LOL, I particularly love the breakdown of Space Jam. Oddly enough, I very briefly considered breaking out an old-school imagemap, like, a month ago. I was trying to get one of those lightbox-style image galleries to work, including a clickable area on the side of each image to get to the next one, and I couldn't figure out how to do all the weird border-padding-whatever-else unholy CSS witchcraft to get the clickable areas aligned correctly with the images. Imagemaps may actually work better than the hacked-together solution I eventually came up with...
Definitely for forms, but for static content? Our design sensibilities weren't there--we were too busy adding animated gifs and blink--but the tech was. Look at a post on Medium. A lot of that style could have been done in 1998.
I'm somewhat ashamed to admit I still write HTML the same way I did in the 90's.
i.e. In notepad using <table> to control the layout.
I never learnt CSS at some-point I should learn it but I work with html so infrequently I never bothered. My "notepad html" is more than enough for anything I've had to do in last two decades.
edit. One thing I do miss is being able to hit view source in browser and understand everything, nowadays all javascript.
God, I'm in the same boat. I don't do web programming, so my web design skills stagnated around the end of the Space Jam Era documented here. I don't work with CSS often enough to memorize its inconsistencies (why is text colored with "color" but backgrounds are colored with "background-color"?), so it's mostly a baffling series of frustrated googling whenever I'm unlucky enough to work with it.
LOL, I particularly love the breakdown of Space Jam. Oddly enough, I very briefly considered breaking out an old-school imagemap, like, a month ago. I was trying to get one of those lightbox-style image galleries to work, including a clickable area on the side of each image to get to the next one, and I couldn't figure out how to do all the weird border-padding-whatever-else unholy CSS witchcraft to get the clickable areas aligned correctly with the images. Imagemaps may actually work better than the hacked-together solution I eventually came up with...