I kinda miss the dead simple near-pixel-perfection and freedom of font choice that could be achieved with tables-and-images web design. If you were smart with choice of color, image format, etc you could even make them load fast on slow connections despite the large number of images involved. Their source code was awful to look at but it’s not like modern web design doesn’t come with its own dump truck full of trade-offs.

* Photoshop-designed websites definitely peaked in the early 2000s*

It lasted longer than that. Sketch wasn’t launched until 2010 and it probably took a good five years (at least) for people to switch to that

Frames were quite useful at times, though, particularly for sites that acted as a directory of other sites. With how slow dialup could be it was sometimes nice to have the list of sites you might want to visit in a compact list frame to the left so you didn’t have to hit back 5 times to get back to the directory or juggle multiple windows (because tabs didn’t yet exist).

Frames were a great way to keep around nav before the sticky css attribute. However, they were horrible for linking.

Frames were the OG SPA