The average old website experience

[Bakartridge]

I find a website from the 90s-2006 that I think looks really cool, I wanna see how they did it, so I use inspect element or view the page source to potentially use it as a reference, yet when I look inside it looks like THIS

(site in the pic is THIS one, see why I wanted to try and reference it? :P)
Just utter table hell that's basically impossible to recreate by hand, so I can the idea of referencing the code, unless if I wanna spend a million hours fiddling with everything to get it looking just right.
Apparently this was so common because a lot of websites used FPE or Dreamweaver or other applications that could create websites for you instead of just being done by hand via HTML/CSS, so I'm kinda SOL since I don't use any programs like that when I make my site.
All I can say is god bless flexbox in modern HTML. :P

[AY38910]

My current one is also like that because I originally made it using HamsterCMS. Later moved it to plain HTML, though, using view source...which meant that the page source is pretty much the same, but gives me much more control over where the links lead to, which means that I can make the folder links be direct instead of redirect.

[arcus]

It's because browsers didn't have decent CSS support until the 2000s. Different browsers rendered things differently. Since tables predate CSS, they appeared in more web crafting guides and had better support. They were the best way to make a multi column layout before CSS caught on.