Let us not forget that you're talking about a time before CSS was available, let alone well supported--let alone _consistently rendered_. This is a time when "web safe color palette" was part of the day-to-day web design lingo.
I could see this being a fun challenge, though--how pleasant of a modern-look web page can you make using only HTML <=v4.0; only 256 'web-safe' color palette; limited font choices. One could demo their work via BrowserStack.
EDIT: I totally forgot to think about the fact that "whitespace techniques" would have been quite a bit more difficult given that a good 80% of your users were viewing on screens that were either 640x480 or 800x600. On a 640x480 screen, this comment takes up half of the space above the fold.[1]