I remember my early days building for the web. We had no separation of concerns. We used and tags, transparent spacer.gifs, and complex table layouts to force our content into a shape. Presentation and content were a single, messy soup.
My first encounter with CSS in Netscape Navigator 4 was a mind-blowing moment. It was the first time I was confronted with the idea that you could (and should) separate the document’s structure (HTML) from its presentation (CSS).