[eponeponepon]

Hear, hear. I'm ashamed to admit I built one or two websites this way - but then I got a job wrangling XML into EPUB, and oh my word am I sorry for my sins now.

And this:

>It wasn't your paper anymore; it was their screens.

...is something the publishing industry needs to, but seems to be pathologically unable to, appreciate.

[wpietri]

Don't feel bad; we all did. The flip side of my rant is that the early web was as ugly as sin. The desire to use it to make something beautiful was a good one, and we had to try a lot of approaches toward that. My problem wasn't that fixed-width, device-hostile designs were tried, it's that they became the dominant approach without anybody understanding what had been lost.

[Pxtl]

Ironically I think the worst culprit for the fixed-width revolution was early CSS. There was a lot more variable-width scaling pages back when everything was tables, but IE-compatible CSS made that nigh-impossible.