Anyway, I had to pull up the devtools inspector, because it wasn't clear at a glance how I achieved the layout of my photos page - it has a kind of pleasing irregularity to it. I knew it was tables, of course - turns out it's a rough two-column layout, with on-again-off-again use of the img align tag - I may have just been playing around with how to sort-of-align a set with portrait, landscape, and square cropped photos.
I'm thinking of this time in part because of the 25th anniversary of Tufts sQ!, my college acapella group. And I remembered that my early web designer self was strongly influenced by my camrade Erica's sQ Official Homepage - both the "columns but not rows design" and the use of transparent-background photo icons (in particular, the airplane on that page) were strong influences on my early sites.
Sometimes when I'm looking at my old raw HTML I'm delighted to see it all in caps - a habit I believe I got from Perl and other technical documentation at the time. )It's not clear if I had outgrown the habit when I designed that page) These days it's unacceptably uncool (probably even deprecated, since xhtml-stuff was in all lower case, I think by mandate) - on par with using tables for simple flexible layouts - but honestly, in an age before fancy highlight editors, it made it very easy to discern what was content and what was markup...
